Why Study Korean?

There are around seventy-eight million speakers of Korean, including large groups in China, Japan, the former Soviet Union, the United States, and Canada. Korean is ranked as the thirteenth most widely used language in the world, and eighth (second among Asian languages) in the entire US.  The visibility of Korean Americans and Korean culture has increased in recent years in the US.  South Korea is an important export market for the US, while the Korean peninsula is important to the US in geo-political terms because of the continuing threat of armed conflict between North and South Korea.  Korean has a long and distinguished literary history and is the medium of the internationally popular Korean film industry.