🇰🇷 What Language Do They Speak in South Korea?
The short answer
South Korea speaks Korean, written in Hangul — an alphabet so logically designed (by royal decree in 1443) that most learners can read it within days. Korean is spoken by about 80 million people across the peninsula and worldwide diaspora.
Worth knowing
- ●Hangul was deliberately invented to be easy: its letters' shapes mimic the mouth positions used to say them
- ●North and South Korean have drifted apart in vocabulary but remain one language
- ●The Jeju island dialect is different enough that UNESCO lists it as critically endangered
Going to South Korea? Say your first words before you land.
Yap gives you a real 30-second spoken conversation in Korean every day — role-play the café, the taxi and the market with an AI tutor that listens and gently corrects. Four weeks of that beats any phrasebook.