Languages

Korean

Hangul, K-drama, K-pop, and a fast-rising economy.

Korean is the language of the Korean peninsula, written in Hangul — an alphabet designed in the fifteenth century so deliberately that it can be learned in an afternoon. Learning it covers an agglutinative grammar, politeness levels that encode social relation, and a sound change system that links words in speech, opening direct access to a culture whose film, music, and technology now reach a global audience.