Korean

About Korean

Korean (한국어) is the official and national language of North and South Korea. It is written using the hangul system. There are a number of dialects of Korean, which are largely mutually intelligible, but there are relatively large differences between the standard forms used in North and South Korea, due to decades of separation.

Hangul is an alphabet consisting of 24 characters, 14 of which represent consonants and 10 of which represent vowels. Although each character indicates only one sound, hangul is usually written in the form of blocks of two or more letters making up an entire syllable. Unlike the Japanese and Chinese writing systems, spaces are included between words when writing using hangul. The system is considered by linguists to be particularly faithful to the sounds of the Korean language, with the shapes of the letters appearing to represent the mouth when making each sound.

Hangul was introduced in the 15^th century CE by King Sejong the Great. Previously, many documents were written in Chinese. However, systems were also developed enabling writers to represent the Korean language using Chinese logographic characters, known in Korean as hanja. Even after the development of the hangul alphabet, hanja continued to be used for centuries. It was not until the late 19^th century that hangul was used in official documents, after years of promotion by various groups.

Since that time, the hangul alphabet has become the standard writing system and continues to be so in both North and South Korea. Schools continue to teach some hanja today, as many Korean words originated as loan words from Chinese, but it is no longer used in normal writing, which uses hangul exclusively.

Korean Fonts

You can download free Korean fonts from our free fonts collection. If you want to use Korean fonts online without downloading, you can use our text generator below.

The following tool will transform your text into graphics with your selection of fonts, colors, and text effects. You can then save the image or use the EMBED button to get image links.

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