Korean

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Overview

Korean is the native language of Koreans as an East-Asian ethnic group, which is a agglutinative language and considered as a language isolate or one of the Altaic language family. It is the sole official language in both of Republic of Korea (a.k.a. South Korea) and Democratic People's Republic of Korea(a.k.a. North Korea), and also one of the official languages of the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China. There are around 80 million Korean speakers in the world presently.

Writing system

ㄱ, ㄴ, ㄷ, ㄹ, ㅁ, ㅂ, ㅅ, ㅇ, ㅈ, ㅊ, ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ, ㅎ, ㅏ, ㅑ, ㅓ, ㅕ, ㅗ, ㅛ, ㅜ, ㅠ, ㅡ, ㅣ 

한글(Hangeul or Hangul) is the unique writing system of Korean, which was created and promulgated by by King Sejong of Joseon Dynasty, a historic kingdom of Korea. It was completed in late 1443 and published with a book titled HunMinJeongEum in 1446.

It is a featural script and has hybrid feature of alphabet and Syllabary. Each letter of Hangul is alphabetic but it is always used in syllabic blocks, not alone. So, 2 or more letters should be grouped as one character to represent elements of the Korean language.

Auxiliary writing system of Korean is Hanja, which is a logogram derived from Chinese character or the Korean name of Chinese character itself. Hanja can not wholly represent Korean language itself but it may be used for some Korean words coined using Chinese characters. Generally, Korean language is exclusively written by Hangul nowadays.

Localization

Locale

• Script direction: left-to-right and top-to-bottom
• Date: YYYY/MM/DD, YY/MM/DD.

Traditionally, dates are all numeric. if necessary, the day of week is written at the last. In the formula official document of government, it separated by dot and white space(YYYY. MM. DD.) and has not the day of week.

• Time: HH:MM:SS
• Time zone: KST (= UTC+09:00)
• Number: -9,999.99
• Currency : -￦9,999.99

National standard

Korean Industrial Standards

Character set and encoding

• KS X 1001:2002 (fomerly KS C 5601-1987)
• KS X 1001:1992 (fomerly KS C 5601-1992)
• KS X 1002:2001 (fomerly KS C 5657-1991)
• KS X 1003:2003 (fomerly KS C 5636)
• KS X 1005-1:2002 (fomerly KS C 5700-1995) - Unicode 2.0

Keyboard layout

• KS X 5002 (fomerly KS C 5715)
• KS X 5003

Notes

Character recognition

To enable Korean input on the XO, see OLPC in Chinese, by Andrew Lee.