South Korea Culture & Language

Korean culture rests on a Confucian social inheritance, a Buddhist and shamanic religious one, and a very recent decision to turn cultural production into an export industry.

Hangul

King Sejong commissioned Hangul in 1443 so that ordinary people could read and write, and the result is one of very few alphabets in the world whose inventor, date and design principles are all known. The consonant shapes represent the position of the tongue and lips; the letters are assembled into syllable blocks. It can be learned in a morning, and it has its own public holiday.

Fermentation

Kimchi is the obvious case — there are hundreds of regional and seasonal varieties, and kimjang, the communal autumn making of it, is UNESCO-listed. Behind it sit doenjang, gochujang and ganjang, the fermented soy pastes and sauces that underpin the whole cuisine, traditionally aged in earthenware jars on a raised platform behind the house.

Eating as a social act

Meals are shared from communal dishes with a spread of banchan side plates. Barbecue is cooked at the table by the group; soju is poured for others and never for oneself, and the youngest pours first, with two hands.

Music and screen

Court music and pansori — a form of sung storytelling by one singer and one drummer, lasting hours — are both UNESCO-listed. The modern wave is policy as much as accident: after 1997 the government treated cultural export as industrial strategy and funded it, and K-pop, television drama and film followed.

Buddhism and the mountain temple

Seven mountain monasteries are UNESCO-listed, and most remain working communities rather than museums. The Tripitaka Koreana at Haeinsa — eighty-one thousand woodblocks carved in the thirteenth century and still intact — is among the great survivals of world literature.

Korean is the sole official language, written in Hangul, and it is a language isolate — no established relationship to Chinese, Japanese or anything else, despite a large layer of Chinese-derived vocabulary.

Learning to read Hangul is genuinely worth an hour of your time. The system is phonetic and regular, and once it clicks you can decode menus, station names and shop signs, many of which turn out to be English words written in Korean letters.

English is taught extensively and signage on transport, roads and at major sights is bilingual, but conversational English is less common than the education statistics suggest, particularly outside Seoul and among older people. Younger Koreans will often understand more than they are confident to speak.

A few words matter: annyeonghaseyo for hello, gamsahamnida for thank you, jeogiyo to call a waiter — which you are expected to do rather than wait — and juseyo to ask for something.