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I don't understand why, but Korean and Japanese sound very similar to me, and also to other native speakers of English. I think I once read a comment saying something like "If it sounds like Japanese but you can't understand what is being said, then it's Korean".

What characteristics, apart from the lack of tones, are shared by the two languages making them sound similar? And what explanations, apart from the Altaic Hypothesis, are there for the two languages being similar for those characteristics?

Luke Sawczak
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Golden Cuy
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    The Altaic Hypothesis is that they're related to Turkic and Mongolic. Few linguists believe this nowadays; but most linguists I know of still find it pretty plausible that Japanese and Korean, specifically, came from the same source. (Even if they didn't, a long history of contact and a shared stratum of Literary Chinese loanwords would still ensure some of the similarity). The set of vowels and consonants in Korean is richer, but isn't that different from Japanese (compare the Wpedia phonology pages). BTW, pitch accent languages like J and dialects of K are considered a kind of tonal lang. – melissa_boiko Jul 01 '17 at 12:07
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    When you don't know a language, there's no telling what other language you might think it sounds similar to. I've heard from people that my language (Norwegian) sounds like Arabic. When I hear languages I'm not expecting to hear - even languages I understand perfectly - I've more than once identified them as exotic languages from other language families, and when I suddenly discover what language I'm listening to, I can't believe how I managed to perceive it so differently at first. I know some Japanese and Korean, and I don't think they sound very similar. – Sverre Jul 01 '17 at 13:25
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    I don't think genetic relationship has much bearing on the question. By any measure, French and Italian sound very different. – Colin Fine Jul 01 '17 at 17:14
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    Japanese and Korean definitely share grammatical similarities, and a huge amount of (similar) Chinese loans, but I don't think their phonological properties are similar at all! This is the first time I have heard anyone claim they sound similar; so, this might be a personal thing for you. As @Sverre says above, what (exotic) languages you find similar is entirely up to your perception. I also don't believe that Chinese loans add to this 'perceived' similarity, as each language has adapted the loans to its own phonology... – sami.spricht.sprache Jul 01 '17 at 21:10
  • ... Besides, you will only notice the similar words if you knew any of the two or Chinese, in the first place. Added to this is geographical stereotyping that we subconsciously take part in. Both Japanese and Korean are spoken at the eastern edge of the world, and to anyone not from there, just this knowledge creates a sense of 'similarity'. I have personal experience of this. Before my American friends knew I was Bengali, they would say that my language sounds like Spanish or Italian whenever they heard me speak on the phone to family back home in India... – sami.spricht.sprache Jul 01 '17 at 21:17
  • But after they learned what the language was, more and more started commenting how like Hindi, Tamil, Pashto (??) etc. it was. To me, despite the fact that a strict comparison of the phonemic inventories would suggest Hindi (and perhaps Pashto; arguably not Tamil) shares the most with Bengali (and definitely genetically), Spanish and Italian phonotactics do seem a lot closer to Bengali than Hindi. If I don't let such geographical bias intervene, Japanese sounds a lot more like Finnish than like Korean, which is identifiably unique! – sami.spricht.sprache Jul 01 '17 at 21:24
  • I'm not sure this affects phonotactics, but Tamil, Korean, and Japanese are all standard SOV languages, and they tend to resemble one another in morphological and syntactic structures, whatever the genetics. Certainly I would not confuse Tamil with either Japanese or Korean, and I don't think anybody else would, either. – jlawler Jul 01 '17 at 21:59
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    I landed at this page, because I was curious why I always think of Japanese as soon as I hear a Korean talking. My knowledge of Korean is almost zero, but I can manage to make myself clear in Japanese. So there must be at least some similarity at least in sentence intonation and phonetics... – Wim Feb 09 '18 at 20:13
  • Incidentally, they're not the only East Asian languages that native speakers of English (without education) tend to confuse. Just yesterday a student reported to me that the 2018 Olympics are in China. "Are you sure about that?" I said. Student: "Yes, I looked it up." Me: "Show me." He pulled up his Google search. Pyeongchang 2018. "See?" he said. "It's something Chinese." A quick talk on jumping to conclusions followed. – Luke Sawczak Feb 10 '18 at 15:04
  • @Sverre - I've heard from people that my language (Norwegian) sounds like Arabic. - I've listened to Faroëse music, and if I didn't know it was Faroëse, my uneducated guess would be Arabic. - sami.spricht.sprache - they would say that my language [Bengali] sounds like Spanish or Italian - I have heard some language of the subcontinent that gives me that impression: Spanish or Latin American people speaking an unintelligible language with a heavy accent. - And when I listen to something that sounds like Brazilian Portuguese, but is totally incomprehensible, odds are it is Russian. – Luís Henrique Feb 12 '18 at 18:55
  • @Sami I'd presume that learning and using English for speakers of the languages you mention bleeds a little into the mothertongue, especially when they actively immersed in English prior to switching back (i.e. before you made the call). Maybe Americans just pick up such slight slant and feel reminded of the primary example, Mexican migrants. I know I do transfer English patterns of speech into my native German, but that's exceptionally ammendable to it. Whereas east asians are noriously bad at English. Although, if foreign languages just sound like noise, correlation by ear may be futile, yes – vectory Apr 21 '19 at 23:52
  • @Luke in fairness, the 2022 Winter Olympics are currently scheduled to be held in Beijing. – Golden Cuy Jan 31 '21 at 09:16
  • @LukeSawczak there are counterexamples as well, a hungarian translator in Helsinki once told me that sometimes in the subway in the evening when there is murmuring she thinks she is hearing her mother tongue spoken. I also percieve J and K to sound somewhat related. A lot depends on training and sensitivty. I am no linguist but I have a globe in my living room and I can read and when I would have to put my life on the question about if they are related by a significant common origin I'd go for yes. What would a linguist do? – Raphael J.F. Berger Sep 10 '23 at 18:56

5 Answers5

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The similarity in sound is the result of two factors: overlapping phonetic inventories, and word length (which affects syllable duration). If you wanted to quantify the similarity, those would be the factors to focus on. The other part of "why" focuses not on what you are reacting to, but what causes the languages to be similar. The best explanation is that this is an areal feature. Japanese and Korean sound similar, but Korean and Khakas do too, likewise you can fold in Kazakh, Mongolian and Chukchi (possibly other languages of the area that I haven't heard). However, Chukchi doesn't sound a lot like Japanese, it sounds more like Mongolian, which sounds like Khakas, which sounds like Korean... We can rule out common genetic basic because (1) errm, Altaic isn't really a valid historical linguistic group, (2) Turkic spoken further west does not sound like related Khakas etc. and (3) Chukchi is not vaguely hypothesized to be related to Japanese.

Lack of tone would not be relevant, since Korean has tonal and non-tonal dialects and virtually all dialects of Japanese (maybe indeed all) have tone, the reduced-contrast system type most common in tone languages (as contrasted with Chinese and SE Asian languages).

A similar phenomenon exists in the Pacific Northwest, where the languages all sound alike, but they are split up into a half-dozen or more genetic groups. For some reason, in contact situations, people can easily pick up a "foreign accent" without the kind of deep linguistic contact that results in exchange of many words and morphemes.

user6726
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    I would add the intonation among the features that influence the perception of a language by foreigners. The intonational curves in Japanese and Korean could be similar, due to a prolonged contact between them. – Artemij Keidan Jul 02 '17 at 16:19
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    Another factor might be, let's say, the "fine tuning" of the articulations, which seems to be typical for whole areas. E.g., in the Western Europe, the lateral continuant /l/ is generally more palatal than the "corresponding" phoneme in Slavic languages (phonetically, [ʟ]), which makes their accent so recognisable. Or, English and German /t/ (and perhaps also that of the other Germanic languages) is shifted towards the alveopalatal zone comparing to the Slavic /t/, which is more dental. I don't know any study on this topic (my fault), but this is the answer I've always given myself about it. – Artemij Keidan Jul 02 '17 at 16:55
  • This "fine tuning" is what I mean in referring to phonetic inventories. I distinguish phonetic and phonological, so rather than transcribing the German and a Slavic laterals as [l] I would transcribe the Slavic one with [ʟ] (maybe: Russian is confusing and my grip on Slovenian is virtually non-existent). Though one might still give them the same phonological analysis. – user6726 Jul 02 '17 at 18:24
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    Minor nitpick: Japanese has pitch, but not tone in the sense generally referred to when talking about languages such as Chinese or Vietnamese. unless linguistic "pitch" been redefined as a binary version of tone while I wasn't looking, of course. I wonder if expectation of similarity (especially if the speaker is visible to the listener) might not have more to do with the perceived similarity than any actual phonetic or phonological resemblance. – Philippe Jul 04 '17 at 13:17
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    Tone never referred to "just what Chinese has". Most tone languages are typologically closer to Japanese than to Chinese, which is a minor subtype in tonology. I agree that visual resemblance is a confounding factor, which is why the test has to be performed with randomized recordings. Still, expectation would not then set Chinese apart. – user6726 Jul 04 '17 at 13:50
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    @Philippe I'm a linguist working on the tone of various Japanese dialects. We use the word "tone" to describe the kind of lexically-marked pitch patterns that Japanese has (as well as Bantu, etc.). For justification of why, see any modern work on tone, e.g. Moira Yip's Tone. For a history and analysis of Japanese tonality specifically see de Boer, The historical development of Japanese tone. – melissa_boiko Feb 13 '18 at 06:35
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    Sally Thomason has a nice paper about Sprachbünde like the Pacific Northwest and how they come about. – jlawler Apr 21 '19 at 23:20
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  1. Extremely similar phonemic systems. In particular, both languages tightly limit syllable-ending consonants, unlike English which permits almost any consonant to end a syllable.

  2. Large numbers of loan words from Chinese converted into those similar phonemic systems means that there are many phonetic cognates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Japanese_and_Korean

Joe Walsh
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Besides what others mentioned here, there's also the fact that as foreigners, we are more likely to hear the similarities (especially when we know a few words) than the differences.

For me, after I met a few people from the south and from the north of China, Cantonese and Mandarin seemed pretty similar. Mostly because my limited vocabulary (of maybe 10 words) would only cover words which have some similarities, and I would ignore the 'minor' differences in intonation, pronunciation, a phoneme here or there and so on. Locals, who know a lot of words where those 'minor' differences decide which word it is, have more difficulties understanding the other version of Chinese if they only know their own one.

This is more vocabulary than sound, but the underlying simplifications our brains make explain why for some (but not all) people, two languages may sound very similar.

Carl Dombrowski
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The following are the reasons why Korean and Japanese sound similar.

  1. Basic sounds of consonants and vowels are very similar. Japanese doesn't have certain vowels that exist in Korean. Japanese also doesn't use consonants as the last sound in a syllable with an exception of 'n'. Korean doesn't have the 'z' sound that exists in Japanese. Otherwise, they are phonetically almost the same.

  2. Their grammars are almost the same. Both are SOV (Subject-Object-Verb). Both are agglutinative. Both use subjective and objective particles. Japanese subjective particle 'ga' is also one of the subjective particles in Korean. Directional particle 'e' in Japanese is also the same in Korean, etc. Sentence endings like 'ta', 'yo' and 'de' also exist in Korean.

  3. Pronunciation of the Chinese-based words are similar. Gakusei, sensei, yakusoku, and toshokan in Japanese are haksaeng, sunsaeng, yaksok, and dosuhgwan in Korean. They are written exactly the same way in Chinese. Much of both Japanese and Korean vocabularies (around 50% or more) are based on Chinese written words and often they are the same words differing only in pronunciation. This is similar to various european languages sharing similar rooted words, differing only slightly in spelling and pronunciation.

Since the sentence structure, grammar, particles, sentence endings, and a lot of the vocabularies are similar, they end up sounding similar. The length of sentences, the word placement and their emphasis, the cadence that results from it make both languages sound similar.

The similarity of the two languages isn't a result of any recent development. It goes back more than a thousand years to two thousand years. After some point of time in history, the two nations didn't really meet with each other much except for a few invasions into Korea by Japan. The last one ended up with annexation of Korea by Imperial Japan for 36 years from 1910 to 1945. The linguistic influence of this period was not fundamental and certainly not something that altered Korean pronunciation. The more objective scholars, not blinded by the two nations' adversarial politics, point to the common origin for their similarities in languages as well as genetics, archaeology, and history.

James K
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I’m Japanese American and unless I’m paying attention to every Korean spoken word I get confused. But Japanese I think flows more evenly whereas Korean may take on more of a Chinese or short sounding speech. Ending of sentences seems similar in structure. Apart from that I don’t hear words meaning the same thing.

Brian k
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