Korean, the native language of the Korean people, is the language used by 45 million people in South Korea and 23 million people in North Korea. Moreover, overseas Koreans living in different parts of the world also use Korean.

China	2 million	USA	1.8 million
Japan	700,000	CIS region	500,000
Latin America	90,000	Canada	70,000
other regions	130,000

The total sum of Korean people, including a number of overseas Koreans, exceeds 73 million world-wide. Korean is ranked as the thirteenth most-used language. Korean is a member of the Altaic language family and is characteristically agglutinative. In other words, Korean attaches a particle to nouns to indicate grammatical meaning or attach an ending to verbs and adjectives to indicate various grammatical meanings. Also, Korean forms words or clauses by adding grammatical factors to vocabulary, which makes it an agglutinative language.