This welcome volume adds to the set of Routledge's “Essential Grammars” of modern languages, which to date also include Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, and Urdu. A readily accessible English-language review of the grammatical structures of Korean is indeed timely and bound to become a core “reference source both for those studying Korean independently and for students in schools, colleges, universities and adult classes of all types to back up their studies,” as the back cover of the book describes it. But I think the book serves considerably more than a pedagogical function, and will be a valued descriptive and data resource for anyone who is curious about how this language is organized. It also will be a source of inspiration for graduate students in linguistics, who increasingly are pursuing projects on the structural aspects of Korean. The promotional first page of the book perhaps sums up these attributes best:

The author, Young-Key Kim-Renaud, is one of the most prominent figures in Korean linguistics and language pedagogy. She combines her expertise in these two fields to weave an impressively succinct orientation to the phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and orthographic properties of the Korean language, organizing these themes into ten carefully crafted chapters along with five concise appendixes.

The shortest of the chapters is the first, “Introduction: The Korean Language and Its Speakers” (pp. 1–2), but its two pages are impressively informative, with snapshots of the language's suspected genetic affiliations, sociolinguistic contextualization, salient grammatical properties, and the special roles played by honorification and sound symbolism. Chapter 2, “Han'gŭl, the Korean Alphabet,” distills the author's earlier edited book-length work on this celebrated writing system (The Korean Alphabet: Its History and Structure [Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1997]). These twelve pages present an especially lucid synopsis of the history and intellectual significance of han'gŭl and lay out clearly the phonetic and orthographic principles on which it is based.

Chapter 3, “Sound Pattern,” reprises in a nutshell the author's influential 1974 University of Hawai‘i dissertation, “Korean Consonantal Phonology” (revised 1995 and published by Hanshin, Seoul). The major vocal and consonantal phonological processes of Korean are thoughtfully exemplified and described here, from residual vowel harmony and the synchronic status of vowel length to syllable-final consonant unreleasing and the various types of assimilations, all without reliance on unnecessarily obfuscating linguistic jargon. For students of phonology in general, or for others who simply are curious about the Korean sound system, the thirty-eight pages of this concise chapter provide a superb overview and an excellent jumping-off point for further research.

Chapter 4, “The Sentence,” lays out and illustrates the core properties of Korean head-final syntax. Here, stative (adjectival) verbs are distinguished from action and existential verbs, the fundamentals of Korean word order are adumbrated, and the major types of sentences are identified according to grammatical function (declarative, interrogative, imperative, proposative, exclamatory) and voice category (active, passive, causative). Chapter 5 is titled simply “Words,” and summarizes the morphological structure of Korean and identifies its word classes. Considerable, appropriate attention is given to words of foreign origin in the language, as there are so many, beginning with origins of a majority of the vocabulary in now nativized Sino-Korean stock. But true loanwords are legion in Korean now, too, especially from Japanese and English, and this chapter presents a solid summary of linguistic strategies that Koreans employ for the adaptation of recent loanwords, itself a fruitful field of current research.

Chapter 6 is devoted specifically to “Verbs” and their extensive (some might say bewildering) range of affixes, including honorific markings. At the end of this succinctly comprehensive review is a welcome discussion of the language's several exceptional verbs, including p-, t-, s-, 1-, and h-irregular verbs. Chapter 7, “Negation,” distinguishes Korean's morphological (lexical) negation strategy using prefixes from syntactic (sentence) negation using different forms of self-standing negative markers. Chapter 8 is titled “Nouns,” and addresses the use and structuring of both nouns and noun-like categories (numerals, classifiers, pronouns, noun phrases), as well as compounding and noun particles. Chapter 9, “Modifiers,” exemplifies and defines the distinction between adnomials, which modify nouns, and adverbials, which modify verbs and sentences. The final chapter is “Linguistic Protocol,” which presents an admirably concise characterization of the Korean system of honorifics and lays out other forms of politeness strategies made use of in the language.

There are five appendices. Appendix 1, Romanization of Han'gŭl Letters,” reviews and compares the three main systems of rendering Korean into Roman letters: McCune-Reischauer, Yale-Martin, and Republic of Korea Governmental. Appendix 2, “A Quick Guide to Using the Korean Dictionary,” also draws comparisons with North Korean practices; appendix 3, “Sample Irregular Verb Conjugation,” lists the most common exponents in these categories, while appendix 4, a glossary, appendix 5, a bibliography, and the index bring the book to a close.

There is very little to criticize in this book, and much to praise. Typographical or idiosyncratic errors are very few (the gloss hantcha on p. 70, with gratuitous t, compares with hancha on p. 14); the inclusion of Korean in the first paragraph on page 1 among “more than 3,000 languages of the world” is rather modest in view of typical claims that there still some 6,000 languages spoken in the world (it depends on how one counts, of course!). Phonetic purists might object to the intermixing throughout of Romanization with phonetic transcription (ch for the affricate [č], for example), but the practice is consistent and perhaps least offensive to the broadest readership. Overall, I think this is a fine, careful contribution to the scholarship on Korean, from both linguistic and pedagogical perspectives, and I expect it to rank among the most influential, most accessible English-language expositions on Korean.