Languages are classified in a similar manner to how organisms are classified taxonomical, that being from their evolutionary history. Unlike the evolution of living things, languages can borrow from one another. A prime example of this is English. While English is considered a Germanic language, in league with Danish, Swedish, German, and Icelandic, it also has heavy influences from Latin, like Spanish and French. This is because when the French speaking Normans invaded England, their language mixed with the Anglo-Saxon people already living there. However, the reason that English is still considered Germanic is because most of the grammar of the origin language will continue being used, as is the case with English. This aspect of language sometimes makes it difficult to classify languages into proper categories. An example of this is the classification of Korean, Jeju, Japanese, and Ryukyuan. Ryukyu is the native peoples of Okinawa’s name for their chain of islands and Ryukyuan is their language. Ryukyuan is a derivative of Japanese and can be analyzed together, in the future they will be referred to as Japonic languages. A parallel can be made with Korean and Jeju, Jeju Island being off the coast of Korea’s southern shore and as such those languages can be analyzed together as well, they will be referred to as Koreanic. Another tool that linguists can use is writing and how letters and characters evolve, but this shines light on another issue with the classification of the Koreanic and Japonic languages. The languages did not have their own system of writing before they adopted Chinese characters, called kanji (漢字：かんじ) in Japanese and hanja (한자) in Korean. They used these characters to represent words in their native tongue until both nations reformed their languages, although they were still based on the look of Chinese characters (This will be discussed later in the following paragraph). Chinese itself is a completely different language from the Koreanic and Japonic languages, being in the Sino-Tibetan category which makes the origins of the Korean and Japonic writing systems a geographical and historical topic, as opposed to a linguistic issue. The difficulty in classifying the Koreanic and the Japonic languages sparks debate on the topic, with some linguists suggesting that they should be considered Altaic languages, such as Turkish and Mongolian, and other saying that they should be considered language isolates until additional evidence and theories come around. The Koreanic and Japonic languages should be considered a branch of the Altaic language family due to geographical, lexigraphical, and phonetic evidences that will be presented in the following paragraphs.

The Koreanic and Japonic languages both reformed their languages to simplify writing with Chinese characters since the languages are so different from Chinese. The Korean King Sejong (세종대왕) of the Joseon (대조선국) Dynasty, also known as Sejong the Great, saw that the Chinese characters were difficult to learn and so the common people could not read or write. Sejong decided to reform the alphabet into a system he called Hunmin chong-um ( 훈〮민져ᅙᅳᆷ) which translates to The Proper Sounds for the Instruction of the People. The script later came to be known as hangul (훈민정음). However, Japanese is different because they still use the Chinese characters in writing in addition to two additional scripts, hiragana (ひらがな) and katakana (カタカナ). In the eighth century the women of the Japanese imperial court were not allowed to learn Chinese characters, so they created a sort of “cursive” version of the character they saw, which became hiragana. Hiragana then eventually moved past the gender-based segregation and became the standard script. Katakana across as a pronunciation aid for Chinese Buddhist scriptures and today it is used for loan words from other languages, the word for television being a prime example (テレビ：te-re-bi). 

Altaic is a language family group throughout central and east Asia. They derive their name from the Altai mountain range in central Asia, in modern day China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Russia. It traditionally contains the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungstic languages. The idea first arose while Philip Johan von Strahlenberg, a Swedish officer who was a prisoner of war after the Great Northern War, was being transported around the eastern Russian Empire. The term Altaic was first used in the context of language in 1844 by Mattias Castrén, a Finnish philologist who studied Uralic languages, including Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian. Mattias proposed that the Altaic and Uralic languages could be grouped together in a “Ural-Altaic” super-family based on vowel harmony and agglutination between the languages, although the Ural-Altaic theory is now widely discredited. Agglutination is a process in linguistic development where more complex words are formed from similar words without changing their spelling or phonetics. The Koreanic and the Japonic languages are also agglutinative languages. For example, the Japanese word 川魚 is actually two words put together with the first word meaning river (川：かわ：ka-wa) and the second meaning fish (魚：ざかな：za-ka-na). The combination is used as a general term for freshwater fish. The idea of Altaic languages developed further in 1857 when Anton Boller, an Austrian scholar, proposed adding Japanese to the Altaic group of the Ural-Altaic super-family and in the 1920s G.J Ramstedt and E.D Polivanov, who were Finnish and Russian respectively, advocated for the inclusion of Korean in the Altaic sub-group, although they rejected the overarching Ural-Altaic hypothesis. Most recently Roy Andrew Miller published Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages in 1971 which argued strongly for the inclusion of Japanese in the Altaic language group.

The origins for the Japonic languages are also disputed, although most linguists believe that a relation to Korean is the strongest hypothesis. The two languages both have a subject-object-verb word order typology meaning that when constructing sentences speakers of both languages format the sentence so that the subject will come first, followed by the object and the verb. For example, a very simple sentence in Japanese is (私は大学生です。) which means “I am a college student. The kanji 私 (わたし：wa-ta-shi) is used to refer to one’s self as the subject of the sentence. The subject of the sentence (大学生) is another example of an agglutination and can be broken down into three words, 大 (だい：dai) meaning big, 学 (がく：ga-ku) meaning study or learning (大 and 学 used together refer to university or college, literately meaning “big learning”), and 生 (せい：sei) which means life or birth, but used here in conjecture with 学 it refers to students. Finally, the verb (です：de-su but pronounced “des”) is used to express the action of existing or being, similar to the English word am in “I am a college student”. Other evidence for the Koreanic and Japonic languages’ genetic relationship is found in their respective reconstructive proto-languages as put forth by John Whiteman in The Languages of Japan and Korea. A proto-language is a hypothetical parent language from which other languages evolve from, and these can be reconstructed using historical evidence. In both reconstructive proto-languages there were seven vowels, two of which are not present in today’s Koreanic and Japonic languages, with only one of the vowels being different (being a vowel sounding like “eh” in Japanese and “eh-i” in Korean). The lands where both languages are spoken are also close geographically and a land bridge existed between the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese Islands existing during the Pleistocene Era, also known as the Ice Age, which ended about 11,700 years ago. The first people to settle the Japanese islands via the land bridge were the Jōmon people, who had a hunter-gatherer culture who settle the island due to its abundance of food. The word Jōmon is used to refer to the straw-rope pattern that was often used to decorate the pottery they used. The Jōmon Period is traditionally dated to around 16,000 and 2,300 years ago. The Jōmon language is typically considered related to Austronesian family due to its likely Taiwanese or costal Chinese origins. A different culture come to dominate the Japanese Islands around 400 BCE which came to known as the Yayoi culture, which is characterized by a dramatic increase in irrigated rice farming, bronze tools, and weaving. It disputed how the Yayoi people, who brought the new technology to the Japanese Islands, came to dominate, with possibilities including invasion and immigration. Either way both groups of people intermixed heavily, this is evident because modern Japanese people share 40 percent of their DNA with the ancient Jōmon people. The Yayoi mostly likely arrived in Japan via boat from the Korean Peninsula and likely spoke a proto-Korean-Japonic language which heavily borrowed words from the present Jōmon language, which was Austronesian. This is evident through use of the Swadesh list. The Swadesh list, which is a list of 100 words said to be part of a core vocabulary between all or most languages, is incredibly useful in comparing languages for similarities. Comparing Japanese with Altaic languages showed that 45 of the 100 words of the Swadesh list were Altaic cognates while the comparison between Japanese and Austronesian languages also showed that 45 of the words were Austronesian cognates. This lends heavily credibility to a mixture of the Altaic proto-Korean-Japanese of the Yayoi and the Austronesian language of the Jōmon. This mixture also explains the strict consonant-vowel structure of Japanese, which is unlike other Altaic languages but is found in some Austronesian languages. 

All Altaic languages shares crucial grammatical aspects. One of these aspects include a very strict subject-object-verb word order, which both the Koreanic and Japonic languages share. They all exhibit vowel harmony between them, meaning that the way speakers pronounce vowel is the same, this is mostly true in the Koreanic and Japonic languages although the differences can be explained by outside influence and isolation that was present in both groups. The Altaic languages also are agglutinative, which is a trait that the Koreanic and Japonic languages share with them. Traditional Altaic languages are very case heavy, a “case” in the grammatical sense is a character or letter used to grammatical function performed by nouns, pronouns, participle or numeral in a phrase, clause, or sentence. For example, Manchu has five cases, Turkish has six, Classical Mongolian had seven, and some Manchu-Tungus languages have upwards of 14. The Koreanic and Japonic languages all use grammatical cases in the form of particles. In our earlier example of a simple Japanese sentence (私は大学生です。)  the particle は (normally pronounced ‘ha’ but in this sense pronounced ‘wa’) is used to denote the subject of the sentence. One aspect of the Japonic languages that distinguishes it from other Altaic languages is the lack of a future tense of verbs. Almost all Altaic languages have also been heavily influenced by outside languages, which was often religiously motivated. For example, Buddhistic texts influenced Mongolian, the Koreanic languages, and to a lesser extent the Japonic languages, and Islamic texts (written in Arabic or Persian) influenced the Turkic languages. The Koreanic and Japonic languages were also heavily influenced by Chinese.

Not all linguists believe that the languages composing the traditional Altaic language family, being Turkic, Tungusic, and Mongolic actually have a genetic relationship. Most of the opposition comes from a comparison of proto-languages. The further back in time you look back the more similar languages will be. For example, French evolved from Latin while Hindi evolved from Sanskrit. Latin and Sanskrit are more closely related than French and Hindi are because of the time gap. This can be applied to specific language families as well. However, in Altaic languages it appears that fewer similarities appear rather than more, which lends credibility to these languages borrowing from one another due to their geography, but the peoples that spoke Altaic languages are also hypothesized to have split off into Central Asia and East Asia within the first few waves of human migration out of Africa. This would explain why they seem to diverge instead of converge because historical linguistic tools are not sufficient enough to definitively proof a relationship beyond a few thousand years. This has a huge effect on the Koreanic and Japonic languages because they did not develop a writing system organically, instead borrowing the Chinese system of writing. Some linguists also theorize that the Koreanic and Japonic languages are language isolates. A language isolate is a language that seemingly had to relationship with other languages, most likely due to prolonged isolation or splitting off before we can reliably find evidence for the languages’ relationship to other languages.  

Language is an integral part of culture and the origins of language have profound effects on the cultures tied to the languages. It is incredibly difficult to study the Koreanic and Japonic languages due to the lack of organic writing systems, the age of their cultures, and the isolation of their cultures. The Korean and Japanese people should know where their language, and to broader extent, their culture originated from and how they are related to other peoples. The question also effects those who are interested in East Asian history, language, and culture, because they are able to understand the origins of those cultures better. 

In conclusion, the Koreanic and Japonic languages should be considered their own branch of the overarching Altaic language family. The historical and geographical evidence show a definite link between the cultures while the grammatical, lexigraphical, and phonetic evidences cement them in place among the Altaic languages.  
