Sino-Korean vocabulary
Sino-Korean vocabulary, or hanja-eo (hangul: 한자어, hanja: 漢子語) are Chinese loanwords in the Korean language. Like Japanese, Korean is unrelated to the Chinese language. Chinese is a Sino-Tibetan language while Korean is a language isolate (meaning that no known languages are related to it), but Chinese has influenced Korean so much that it made many changes to the Korean language. Chinese loanwords make up around 60% of the language's vocabulary, even though Koreans tend to use native Korean words a lot more in everyday speech. This is similar to how around 50% of English words come from Latin, French, or Greek, but English speakers tend to use native English words a lot more. Also similar to Japanese, Chinese serves as one the three main sources for Korean words, the other two being native Korean words and words from other foreign languages, especially English. When some Chinese loanwords changed meanings in Japanese, their meanings also changed in Korean because Korea was a Japanese colony at the time these words changed. Since Koreans were forced by law to speak Japanese and forbidden to speak Korean, the Chinese loanwords adopted the new Japanese meanings when Koreans were allowed to freely speak their own language again.