Romanizations

There are several transcriptions and transliterations of the Korean language in widespread use. The Yale Romanization system, named such as it was developed by a group of linguists at Yale University, is the standard in linguistics research but it is rare to see it outside of academia. The Kontsevich system is the official Cyrillization transcription method for the Russian language. Both Koreas have used uniquely modified versions of the McCune-Reischauer system as their official transcription standard but South Korea changed to the Revised Romanization system.

Developed by the National Institute of Korean Language and the official standard from 2000, Revised Romanization restricts itself to using the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Simply said, if you see apostrophes, ŏ, or ŭ, for example chan'gŭm, it is McCune-Reischauer and not the current system used in South Korea. If you are wondering why Pusan National University is in Busan City and why Kangnam University is in Gangnam, this is because everything initially got their Romanization under McCune-Reischauer. When South Korea changed to Revised Romanization, the cities and districts changed their spellings to match the new system, but universities didn’t. This is also why the annual film festival in Busan City is sometimes referred to as Busan International Film Festival and sometimes the Pusan International Film Festival as the spelling was different depending on when the article you read was published or the plaque you saw was posted.

A useful tool in Korean Romanization is the Korean Romanization Converter developed by Pusan National University. Their tool offers Revised Romanization, McCune-Reischauer, and Yale support. Sometimes their website goes down for a few hours. If the site does not work, try again later.

If you wish to learn the Revised Romanization system, please see the following tables. Please note that when one cluster ends in a consonant and the next cluster starts with a different consonant, some special phonetic changes occur. For our purposes, we won't get into that level of detail but there is a page on Wikipedia that provides a detailed table. For additional Revised Romanization information, please see the National Institute of Korean Language. And while this system can be very useful, it will never 100% match with Korean. If you want to get the correct sounds of the Korean alphabet down, you should confirm the sounds with a native Korean speaker or see if there is a class or self-study option that interests you.

Vowels

Consonants

For individual clusters, the table below shows how consonants are Romanized. The "Initial” row shows the how the consonant is spelled when starting a cluster, the “Final” row is how the consonant is spelled when ending a cluster; the 받침 as mentioned previously. This is why the 국 in 한국어 is spelled guk and not gug.