The geographically close Japanese and Korean languages have a considerable amount of similarities in grammar and phonology, among other features, while showing almost no lexical resemblances and being written in distinct scripts. Yet, observing the said similarities, linguists have formulated different theories proposing a genetic relationship between them, though these studies either lack conclusive evidence or have suffered large discredit (like versions of the well-known Altaic hypothesis).
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Grammar
Japanese and Korean both have an agglutinative morphology where verbs may function as prefixes and a subject–object–verb (SOV) typology. This allows words of different parts of speech to be placed in exactly the same order if some sentences are intended to be translated from one language to another, revealing that Japanese and Korean are grammatically similar.
Vocabulary
The two languages are not thought to share any cognates (other than loanwords), for their vocabularies do not phonetically resemble each other. However, some linguists analysed a tiny amount of translations which may be perceived as phonetic parallels. This is exemplified in the following table:
Writing
Korean is written in the Korean featural alphabet (known as Hangul in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea), while Japanese is written with a combination of kanji (Chinese characters adapted for Japanese) and kana (two writing systems representing the same sounds, composed primarily of syllables, each used for different purposes). This makes modern Korean and Japanese essentially different in writing, although they both used solely Chinese characters in their early writing stages, with the writing experiencing a gradual mutation through centuries into its modern form.
Other features
Both languages have an elaborate system of honorifics. See Japanese honorifics and Korean honorifics.