- 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.
Reach summary
What one translation into Korean covers, across every market that speaks it.
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.
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%
South Korea, the largest single territory, 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. It counts whole economies, not the speakers' share, so read it as an upper bound.
Translation rate
1.30×
1.0×1.6×+
About 30% above a mainstream pair, reflecting how many vendors work in it. It feeds the budget estimator.
Where Korean is spoken
Every territory CLDR records, largest speaker count first. Share is of that territory's own population, so the column has no total.
| Territory | Share of that market | Speakers | Online | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| South KoreaKR | 100% | 52.1M | 51M | official |
| North KoreaKP | 88% | 23.1M | 0 | official |
| ChinaCN | 0.2% | 2.1M | 1.9M | minority or diaspora |
| United StatesUS | 0.3% | 1M | 971.5K | minority or diaspora |
| JapanJP | 0.6% | 640.7K | 548K | minority or diaspora |
| CanadaCA | 0.6% | 217.3K | 205K | minority or diaspora |
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, but they are why total reach runs higher than any one country page shows. A dash in the online column means no World Bank internet figure, not zero.
What it takes to ship
The work that is not translation.
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.