THE ROLE OF SINO-KOREAN LOANWORDS IN CONTEMPORARY KOREAN LEXICON: A LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS

The status of Sino-Korean-origin items in contemporary Korean lexicon remains unsettled because they function at once as a historical layer, a stylistic marker, and a terminological resource. The purpose of this study is to identify their functional load in the present language system and to describe how they are distributed across formal, public, and everyday speech. The investigation combines historical-comparative analysis, hermeneutic interpretation, source-based inquiry, and systematic inspection of corpus concordances; dictionary entries, textual fragments, and semantic correspondences were compared throughout the analysis. The reading of the material shows that Sino-Korean vocabulary is especially prominent in official style, administrative terminology, and abstract naming, while in intimate relations, evaluative expression, and ordinary conversation it coexists with native Korean vocabulary. The analysis also brings out narrowing of meaning, stylistic neutralization, and semantic shift in several items, which indicates that they should be treated not only as borrowings but also as a lexically reorganized resource inside the system. The scholarly contribution lies in a functional-typological model that connects present-day distribution patterns with historical strata and explains why these items continue to structure the contemporary lexicon without fully displacing native forms.