This article is about ancient languages of Korea. For modern-day ones of China, see Sinitic languages. For the North American language, see Hän language.
Chinese commanderies (in purple) and their eastern neighbours mentioned in the Records of the Three Kingdoms[1]
The Han languages (Korean: 한어; Hanja: 韓語) or Samhan languages (삼한어; 三韓語) were the languages of the Samhan ('three Han') of ancient southern Korea, the confederacies of Mahan, Byeonhan and Jinhan.
They are mentioned in surveys of the peninsula in the 3rd century found in Chinese histories, which also contain lists of placenames, but are otherwise unattested.
There is no consensus about the relationships between these languages and the languages of later kingdoms.
The Chinese histories state that Jinhan had a different language from Mahan, listing some Jinhan words said to be shared with the Chinese state of Qin, from which the Jinhan claimed to be refugees (a claim discounted by most historians).[4]
The two accounts differ on the relationship between the languages of Byeonhan and Jinhan, with the Records of the Three Kingdoms describing them as similar, but the Book of the Later Han referring to differences.[5]
The Records of the Three Kingdoms also gives phonographic transcriptions in Chinese characters of names of settlements, 54 in Mahan and 12 each in Byeonhan and Jinhan.
Some of these names appear to include suffixes:[6][7]
Six of the Mahan names include a suffix *-pieliɑi⟨卑離⟩,[a] which has been compared with the common element puri⟨夫里⟩ 'town' in later Baekje placenames and Late Middle Korean {IPA|-βɨr}} 'town'.[6]
Two of the Byeonhan names and one of the Jinhan names include a suffix *-mietoŋ⟨彌凍⟩, which has been compared with Late Middle Korean mith and Proto-Japonic*mətə, both meaning 'base, bottom' and claimed by Samuel Martin to be cognate.[6]
One of the Byeonhan names ends with *-jama⟨邪馬⟩, which is commonly identified with Proto-Japonic *jama 'mountain'.[6]
In the 4th century, Baekje, the Gaya confederacy and Silla arose from Mahan, Byeonhan and Jinhan respectively.[9][10][b]
Linguistic evidence from these states is sparse and, being recorded in Chinese characters, difficult to interpret.
Most of these materials come from Silla, whose language is generally believed to be ancestral to all extant Korean varieties as a result of the Sillan unification of most of the peninsula in the late 7th century.[12][13]
Apart from placenames, whose interpretation is controversial, data on the Baekje language is extremely sparse:[14]
The Book of Zhou (636) states that the Baekje gentry and commoners have different words for 'king'.[16]
According to the Samguk sagi, the kingdom of Baekje was founded by immigrants from Goguryeo who took over Mahan.[17][18]
The Japanese history Nihon Shoki, compiled in the early 8th century from earlier documents, including some from Baekje, records 42 Baekje words. These are transcribed as Old Japanese syllables, which are restricted to the form (C)V, limiting the precision of the transcription. About half of them appear to be Koreanic.[19]
A single word is directly attributed to the Gaya language in the Samguk sagi (1145).
It is the word for 'gate', and appears to resemble the Old Japanese word for 'gate'.[20]
Different authors have offered a variety of views on the natures of these languages, based on the extant records and evidence that Peninsular Japonic languages were still spoken in southern and central parts of the peninsula in the early centuries of the common era.[21]
The issue is politically charged in Korea, with scholars who point out differences being accused by nationalists of trying to "divide the homeland".[22]
Based on the account of the Records of the Three Kingdoms, Lee Ki-Moon divided the languages spoken on the Korean peninsula at that time into Puyŏ and Han groups.[23]
Lee originally proposed that these were two branches of a Koreanic language family, a view that was widely adopted by scholars in Korea.[24][25][26]
He later argued that the Puyŏ languages were intermediate between Korean and Japanese.[15]
Christopher Beckwith argues that the Han languages were Koreanic, and replaced the Japonic Puyŏ languages from the 7th century.[27]Alexander Vovin and James Marshall Unger argue that the Han languages were Japonic, and were replaced by Koreanic Puyŏ languages in the 4th century.[28][29]
Based on the vocabulary in the Nihon Shoki and the passage in the Book of Zhou about words for 'king', Kōno Rokurō argued that the kingdom of Baekje was bilingual, with the gentry speaking a Puyŏ language and the common people a Han language.[16][30]Juha Janhunen argues that Baekje was Japonic speaking until Koreanic expanded from Silla.[31]
^Traditional histories give founding dates for Baekje and Silla of 18 BC and 57 BC respectively, and these dates are repeated in textbooks, but archaeological and documentary evidence indicates that these kingdoms were founded in the 4th century.[11]
Kim, Won-yong (1983), Recent Archaeological Discoveries in the Republic of Korea, Tokyo: Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, UNESCO, ISBN978-92-3-102001-8.
Kim, Nam-Kil (1987), "Korean", in Comrie, Bernard (ed.), The World's Major Languages, Oxford University Press, pp. 881–898, ISBN978-0-19-520521-3.
Kōno, Rokurō (1987), "The bilingualism of the Paekche language", Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko, 45: 75–86.
Lee, Iksop; Ramsey, S. Robert (2000), The Korean Language, SUNY Press, ISBN978-0-7914-4831-1.
Lee, Ki-Moon; Ramsey, S. Robert (2011), A History of the Korean Language, Cambridge University Press, ISBN978-1-139-49448-9.
Pai, Hyung Il 裵炯逸 (2000), Constructing "Korean" Origins: A Critical Review of Archaeology, Historiography, and Racial Myth in Korean State-formation Theories, Harvard University Asia Center, ISBN978-0-674-00244-9.
Schuessler, Axel (2007), ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, ISBN978-0-8248-2975-9.
Seth, Michael J. (2024), A Concise History of Korea: From Antiquity to the Present (4th ed.), Rowman & Littlefield, ISBN978-1-5381-7452-4.
Shin, Michael D., ed. (2014), Korean History in Maps, Cambridge University Press, ISBN978-1-107-09846-6.
Sohn, Ho-Min (1999), The Korean Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN978-0-521-36123-1.
Unger, J. Marshall (2009), The role of contact in the origins of the Japanese and Korean languages, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, ISBN978-0-8248-3279-7.
Vovin, Alexander (2005), "Koguryŏ and Paekche: different languages or dialects of Old Korean?", Journal of Inner and East Asian Studies, 2 (2): 107–140.
——— (2013), "From Koguryo to Tamna: Slowly riding to the South with speakers of Proto-Korean", Korean Linguistics, 15 (2): 222–240, doi:10.1075/kl.15.2.03vov.
Whitman, John (2011), "Northeast Asian Linguistic Ecology and the Advent of Rice Agriculture in Korea and Japan", Rice, 4 (3–4): 149–158, doi:10.1007/s12284-011-9080-0.
——— (2013), "A History of the Korean Language, by Ki-Moon Lee and Robert Ramsey", Korean Linguistics, 15 (2): 246–260, doi:10.1075/kl.15.2.05whi.
——— (2015), "Old Korean", in Brown, Lucien; Yeon, Jaehoon (eds.), The Handbook of Korean Linguistics, Wiley, pp. 421–438, ISBN978-1-118-35491-9.
