- ISO 639
ko- Its own name
- 한국어
- Script
- Hangul
- Direction
- Left to right
Korean
Korean (한국어) is spoken by 79.2M people across 6 territories in CLDR, and is official nationally in 2 of them. South Korea holds 66% of its speakers. One translation covers all of it, which is why localization is planned by language and launched by market.
At a glance
What one translation into Korean buys, before anyone argues about which market to enter first.
Speakers
79.2M
South Korea 66% · North Korea 29% · China 3%
First and second language speakers, summed across the 6 territories CLDR records. The bar splits them by territory, largest first.
Online speakers
54.7M
0%100%
69% of speakers, once each territory's speaker count is scaled by its World Bank internet rate. Territories with no internet figure contribute nothing, so this is a floor.
Concentration
66%
0%100%
The largest single territory, South Korea, holds 66% of speakers. Spread out enough that regional wording and currency will come up.
Territories
6
2 where it is official nationally, 2 where at least one person in five speaks it. The rest are diaspora and minority populations, which CLDR does record.
Reachable GDP
$66.5T
Combined GDP of every territory where the language appears at all. An upper bound on the market, not a revenue forecast: it counts the whole economy, not the speakers' share of it.
Translation rate
1.30×
1.0×1.6×+
About 30% above a mainstream pair, reflecting how many vendors work in it. Feeds the budget estimator directly.
Where Korean is spoken
Every territory CLDR records, largest speaker count first. Share is of that territory's own population, so the column does not add up to anything.
| Territory | Share of that market | Speakers | Online | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| South KoreaKR | 100% | 52.1M | 51M | official |
| North KoreaKP | 88% | 23.1M | 0 | official |
| ChinaCN | 0.15% | 2.1M | 1.9M | minority or diaspora |
| United StatesUS | 0.30% | 1M | 971.5K | minority or diaspora |
| JapanJP | 0.52% | 640.7K | 548K | minority or diaspora |
| CanadaCA | 0.56% | 217.3K | 205K | minority or diaspora |
The long tail matters. CLDR does record diaspora populations, so a language usually appears in more territories than its home markets, at small shares. Those rows rarely justify a launch on their own. They are why a language's total reach is larger than any one country page shows. A dash in the online column means the territory has no World Bank internet figure, and it does not mean zero.
What it takes to ship
The work that is not translation: the writing system, the grammar your message format has to survive, and what the words cost.
Writing system
Hangul
Lays out left to right, the same as the source. Bundle a webfont: platform defaults do not reliably cover this script.
Plural categories
1
No grammatical plural agreement, so counted messages need one arm.
Rate index
1.30×
Prices about 30% above a mainstream pair.
Engineering note. Hangul + occasional Hanja.