The Goguryeo language, or Koguryoan, was the language of the ancient kingdom of Goguryeo (37 BCE – 668 CE), one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea.
Early Chinese histories state that the language was similar to those of Buyeo, Okjeo and Ye. Ki-Moon Lee grouped these four as the Puyŏ languages. The histories also stated that these languages were different from those of the Yilou and Mohe.
All of these languages are unattested except for Goguryeo, for which evidence is limited and controversial.
The most cited evidence is a body of placename glosses in the Samguk sagi.
Most researchers in Korea, assuming that the people of Goguryeo spoke a dialect of Old Korean, have treated these words as Korean, while other scholars have emphasized similarities with Japonic languages.
Lee and Ramsey suggest that the language was intermediate between the two families.
Other authors suggest that these placenames reflect the languages of other peoples in the part of central Korea captured by Goguryeo in the 5th century, rather than Goguryeo itself.
Other evidence is extremely sparse, and is limited to peculiarities in the Chinese language of Goguryeo inscriptions and a very few Goguryeo words glossed in Chinese texts.
Vovin and Unger suggest that it was the original form of Koreanic, which subsequently replaced Japonic languages in the south of the peninsula.
Others maintain that it was Tungusic, or that there is insufficient evidence to establish its affiliation.
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Descriptions in Chinese sources
Chinese histories provide the only contemporaneous descriptions of peoples of the Korean peninsula and eastern Manchuria in the early centuries of the common era.
They contain impressionistic remarks about the languages of the area based on second-hand reports, and sometimes contradict one another.
Later Korean histories, such as the Samguk sagi, do not describe the languages of the three kingdoms.
The state of Buyeo, in the upper Songhua basin, was known to the Chinese from the 3rd century BCE.
Chapter 30 "Description of the Eastern Barbarians" of the Records of the Three Kingdoms records a survey carried out by the Chinese state of Wei after their defeat of Goguryeo in 244.
Another version of this report, likely from a common source, is found in chapter 85 of the Book of the Later Han (5th century).
The report states that the languages of Buyeo, Goguryeo and Ye were similar, and that the language of Okjeo was only slightly different from them.
Goguryeo, originally inhabiting the valley of the Hun River, believed themselves to be a southern offshoot of Buyeo.
Over the next few centuries they would expand to rule much of eastern Manchuria and northern Korea.
To the south of the Chinese Lelang Commandery lay the Samhan ('three Han'), Mahan, Byeonhan and Jinhan, who the Records of the Three Kingdoms described in quite different terms from Buyeo and Goguryeo.
Based on this text, Ki-Moon Lee divided the languages spoken on the Korean peninsula at that time into Puyŏ and Han groups.
Placename glosses in the Samguk sagi
The most widely cited evidence for Goguryeo is chapter 37 of the Samguk sagi, a history of the Three Kingdoms period written in Classical Chinese and compiled in 1145 from earlier records that are no longer extant.
This chapter surveys the part of Goguryeo annexed by Silla, with entries like
七重縣一云難隱別
The phrase 一云 'one calls' separates two alternative names for a place.
The first part, 七重縣, can be read in Chinese as 'seven-fold county', while 難隱別 is meaningless, and hence seems to use Chinese characters to represent the sound of the name.
From other examples, scholars infer that 難隱 means 'seven' and 別 means '-fold, layer', while the 'county' part of the gloss is not represented.
In this way, a vocabulary of 80 to 100 words has been extracted from these place names.
Although the pronunciations recorded using Chinese characters are difficult to interpret, some of these words appear to resemble Koreanic, Japonic and Tungusic words.
It is generally agreed that these glosses demonstrate that Japonic languages were once spoken in part of the Korean peninsula, but there is no consensus on the identity of the speakers.
Scholars who take these words as representing the language of Goguryeo have come to a range of conclusions about the language.
Most Korean scholars view it as a form of Old Korean and focus on Korean interpretations of the data.
Other data
Other data on the language of Goguryeo is extremely sparse, and its affiliation remains unclear.
A small number of inscriptions have been found in Goguryeo territory, including the Gwanggaeto Stele (erected in Ji'an in 414), four inscriptions on the walls of Pyongyang Castle, and a stele in Jungwon, Chungju (590s).
All are written in Chinese, but some of them contain irregularities, including a few examples of object–verb order (as found in Korean and other northeast Asian languages) instead of the usual Chinese verb–object order, and some uses of the characters 之 and 伊, which some authors have connected to their use to represent Korean particles in later Idu texts from Unified Silla.
Beckwith identified a dozen names of places and people in Chinese histories that he argued were Goguryeo words.
In his review of Beckwith's book, Byington criticized the historical basis of these identifications, as well as Beckwith's theories of Goguryeo origins in western Liaoning.
Chinese histories contain a few glosses of Goguryeo words:
Chapter 30 of the Records of the Three Kingdoms (late 3rd century) states that 溝漊 (Eastern Han Chinese *koro, Middle Chinese kuw-luw) is the Goguryeo word for 'castle'. Beckwith compared this word with Old Japanese kura 'storehouse'. Alexander Vovin compared it with Middle Mongolian qoto-n and Manchu hoton 'fortified town', but with lenition of t as in Korean.
Chapter 100 of the Book of Wei (mid-6th century) gives 謁奢 ʔjot-syæ 'big elder brother' and 太奢 thajH-syae 'little elder brother'. Vovin compared ʔjot with Late Middle Korean nyěys 'old' and thajH with an Early Middle Korean word 'small, young' transcribed as ʔæH-thwojH (亞退) in the Jilin leishi (1103–1104). The word syæ is closely matched by Old Japanese se 'elder brother', but this has a limited distribution in Japonic, and may be a loanword.