Korean Letters (Hangul)

Korean is written in Hangul (한글, Hangeul), a true alphabet with separate letters for consonants and vowels, called jamo. What makes it look like Chinese or Japanese is that the letters of each syllable are stacked into a square block. 한 is ㅎ h + ㅏ a + ㄴ n, 글 is ㄱ g + ㅡ eu + ㄹ l, so 한글 reads han-geul. Tall vowels such as ㅏ ㅓ ㅣ go to the right of the first consonant (가 ga), flat ones such as ㅗ ㅜ ㅡ go under it (고 go), and a final consonant, the batchim (받침), sits at the bottom (각 gak).

Every block starts with a consonant. When a syllable begins with a vowel, the circle ㅇ fills that place and stays silent: 아이 ai 'child'. At the bottom of a block the same ㅇ is said ng: 강 gang 'river'. Hangul has no capital and small letters, and unlike Chinese and Japanese, Korean puts spaces between words.

So there are no 'Korean letters A to Z'. The modern alphabet has 24 basic letters, 14 consonants and 10 vowels; with the 5 doubled consonants and the 11 compound vowels that makes the 40 jamo in the symbol grid above. Combining 19 first consonants, 21 vowels and 27 possible finals (or none) gives 11,172 syllable blocks, and Unicode has a ready-made character for every one of them, from 가 to 힣.

Korean alphabet chart: the consonants and their sounds

King Sejong the Great created the alphabet in 1443 and published it in 1446 as Hunminjeongeum, 'the correct sounds for teaching the people'. The book explains that the basic consonants draw the speech organs: ㄱ the back of the tongue closing the throat, ㄴ the tongue touching the ridge behind the teeth, ㅁ the mouth, ㅅ a tooth and ㅇ the throat. Related sounds are built from them, so letters that sound alike look alike.

Korean contrasts three kinds of stop where English has two. A plain consonant is soft (ㄱ ㄷ ㅂ ㅈ), an extra stroke adds a puff of air (ㅋ ㅌ ㅍ ㅊ), and a doubled letter is tense, said with a tight throat and no puff (ㄲ ㄸ ㅃ ㅆ ㅉ). The difference changes words: 달 dal 'moon', 탈 tal 'mask', 딸 ttal 'daughter'; 불 bul 'fire', 풀 pul 'grass', 뿔 ppul 'horn'. ㄹ is an r between vowels (나라 nara 'country') and an l at the end of a syllable (서울 Seoul).

The letters have names that show their sound at the start and at the end: ㄱ 기역 giyeok, ㄴ 니은 nieun, ㄷ 디귿 digeut, ㄹ 리을 rieul, ㅁ 미음 mieum, ㅂ 비읍 bieup, ㅅ 시옷 siot, ㅇ 이응 ieung, ㅈ 지읒 jieut, ㅎ 히읗 hieut. At the end of a syllable only seven sounds are possible, so several letters merge there: 옷 ot 'clothes' and 꽃 kkot 'flower' both end in a t sound.

Eleven pairs of consonants appear only as a double batchim: ㄳ ㄵ ㄶ ㄺ ㄻ ㄼ ㄽ ㄾ ㄿ ㅀ ㅄ. They come in everyday words such as 닭 dak 'chicken', 많다 manta 'to be many', 앉다 'to sit', 없다 eopda 'there is none' and 값 gap 'price'. Usually only one is heard at the end of a word or before a consonant; before a vowel, the second often links to the next syllable, with sound changes: 닭이 dalgi.

Korean vowels: heaven, earth and human

The vowels were built from three strokes with a meaning: a dot ㆍ for heaven, a flat line ㅡ for the earth and an upright line ㅣ for a human. A short stroke on one side of ㅣ or ㅡ gives ㅏ a, ㅓ eo (an open 'uh'), ㅗ o and ㅜ u; doubling that stroke adds a y: ㅑ ya, ㅕ yeo, ㅛ yo, ㅠ yu. ㅡ eu is an unrounded 'oo' said with spread lips.

Compound vowels join two of them. Adding ㅣ gives ㅐ ae and ㅔ e, which most Koreans now say the same way, so 개 gae 'dog' and 게 ge 'crab' are told apart by spelling and context. ㅗ and ㅜ before another vowel become a w: ㅘ wa in 사과 sagwa 'apple', ㅝ wo in 뭐 mwo 'what', ㅟ wi in 귀 gwi 'ear'. ㅚ oe (회사 hoesa 'company'), ㅙ wae and ㅞ we sound almost alike in today's speech, and ㅢ ui is the vowel of 의사 uisa 'doctor'.

The 1446 alphabet had 28 letters. Four later fell out of use: ㆆ, ㆁ, ㅿ and ㆍ (arae-a). The ng sound once written with ㆁ survives in Korean and is now written with ㅇ; ㆍ's vowel merged into others and standard spelling dropped it in 1933. ㆍ still writes a vowel of the Jeju language, and it lives on in Korean phone keyboards: the Cheonjiin keypad builds all vowels from the three keys ㆍ ㅡ ㅣ, using the three elements of Sejong's vowel design.

Korean punctuation marks, symbols and the won ₩

Korean uses the same full stop, comma, question mark and exclamation mark as English, and curly quotation marks “ ” and ‘ ’. The 2015 punctuation rules put the titles of books and newspapers in 『 』 or 《 》 and the titles of songs, poems, articles and artworks in 「 」 or 〈 〉, though plain quotation marks are also accepted. The middle dot · joins listed words and the numbers of famous dates: 3·1절 is Independence Movement Day on 1 March, 6·25 전쟁 the Korean War that began on 25 June 1950.

The tilde ~ marks ranges (9시~18시, 9:00 to 18:00) and, in chat, a stretched, friendly tone (안녕~). The standard ellipsis is six dots set in the middle of the line, ⋯⋯, though …… and three dots are allowed too. The rules also define ○ and × for hiding a word, as in a name written 김○○, and □ for a letter that cannot be read in an old inscription. ※ introduces a note, and circled letters number points: ㉠ ㉡ ㉢ and ㉮ ㉯ ㉰ appear in school exam questions and contracts. ㈜ is short for 주식회사 'joint-stock company' in front of a company name.

Both Koreas pay in the won, written ₩ before the number in Latin text (₩10,000) and 원 after it in Korean (10,000원). Fonts draw ₩ with one bar or two; it is the same character, U+20A9 (HTML ₩). The South Korea and North Korea collections have the flags 🇰🇷 🇰🇵 and the emoji for each country.

How to type Korean on a keyboard, Mac and phone

Windows: Settings, Time & language, Language & region, Add a language, Korean. Switch to it with Windows + Space, then toggle between Hangul and Latin with the 한/영 key, which is Right Alt on most non-Korean keyboards. Mac: System Settings, Keyboard, Input Sources, Edit, +, Korean, 2-Set Korean; switch with Control + Space or the Globe key. You type letters, not blocks: the input method assembles them, so g k s gives ㅎ ㅏ ㄴ → 한.

The standard layout, dubeolsik (two-set), puts consonants under the left hand and vowels under the right. Top row: Q ㅂ, W ㅈ, E ㄷ, R ㄱ, T ㅅ, Y ㅛ, U ㅕ, I ㅑ, O ㅐ, P ㅔ. Middle row: A ㅁ, S ㄴ, D ㅇ, F ㄹ, G ㅎ, H ㅗ, J ㅓ, K ㅏ, L ㅣ. Bottom row: Z ㅋ, X ㅌ, C ㅊ, V ㅍ, B ㅠ, N ㅜ, M ㅡ. Shift gives the doubled consonants on Q W E R T (ㅃ ㅉ ㄸ ㄲ ㅆ) and ㅒ ㅖ on O and P. Compound vowels are typed as their parts: ㅗ then ㅏ makes ㅘ.

On Windows, the 한자 key (Right Ctrl on most keyboards) after a Hangul word offers Chinese characters, and after a single consonant it opens symbol lists: ㅁ for general symbols such as ※ and ★, ㅅ for circled and bracketed Korean letters such as ㉠ and ㈀. With 2-Set Korean on a Mac, the key left of 1 types ₩. Phones: add the Korean keyboard (iPhone: Settings, General, Keyboard; Android: Gboard or Samsung Keyboard languages). Choose the two-set layout, which matches the computer, or Cheonjiin, the ㆍ ㅡ ㅣ keypad many Koreans prefer on phones.

Where Korean is spoken

Korean has about 80 million speakers by current estimates (CLDR counts about 79 million). It is the language of South Korea 🇰🇷, about 52 million speakers, and North Korea 🇰🇵, around 23 million by CLDR's estimate. The two states write it with the same 40 letters but call the script differently, Hangeul in the South and Chosŏn'gŭl (조선글) in the North, sort the double consonants differently in dictionaries and celebrate it on different days: 9 October in the South and 15 January in the North.

China 🇨🇳 has about 2 million Korean speakers, many of them in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in Jilin, where Korean is an official language beside Chinese and street signs are bilingual. Emigration built large communities in the United States 🇺🇸, about 1 million speakers, Japan 🇯🇵, with several hundred thousand ethnic Koreans, many of whom speak mainly Japanese, and Canada 🇨🇦, around 220,000, all rough estimates. The Koryo-saram of Central Asia, Koreans deported from the Soviet Far East in 1937, number an estimated 175,000 in Uzbekistan and 120,000 in Kazakhstan, though most now speak Russian.

Korean is usually treated as a language family of its own, together with the language of Jeju island. It borrowed a large part of its vocabulary from Chinese, and words of Chinese origin can still be written in Hanja (漢字), Chinese characters: South Korean schools teach 1,800 of them, and newspapers use a few for clarity, such as 韓 for Korea. Japanese shares much of its grammar and word order, but most linguists do not count the two as related. See the Japanese and Chinese collections for their characters.