Korean punctuation

For the Korean language, South Korea mainly uses a combination of East Asian and European punctuation, while North Korea uses a little more of the East Asian punctuation style.

Differences from European punctuation

• Although commas are also used especially in a digital environment due to the ease of typing, the interpunct (·) is used for short in-line lists: "사과·배·복숭아·수박은 모두 과일이다." Translation: "Apples, pears, peaches, and watermelons are all fruits."
• Although the correct way to quote is to use double quotation marks in South Korea, and guillemets in North Korea, fullwidth quotes such as 『...』 or 「...」 are mostly used when it is written in vertical writing; for effective expression; or to just replace European quotation marks.
• Many ancient Korean books contain thousands of words with no spaces between them; however, when necessary to explicitly denote a pause or break, Judou marks such as "。" and "、" were used.
• Since Korean is agglutinative, the rules regarding parentheses and spacing are different from European rules. For example, in the sentence "사과(沙果)는 과일이다", inserting a space in between other letters and the parentheses will be an error as 는 marks 사과 (apple) as the topic and is not a separate, independent word.
• The wave dash (〜) is used to mark ranges in numbers. e.g. 1〜10 (일에서 십, one to ten)
• As in Japanese, the tilde may also be used to indicate a long or drawn-out vowel (그렇구나〜 or 랄랄라〜), usually for comic or cute effect.

North-South differences

In the North, guillemets 《 and 》 are the symbols used for quotes; in the South, quotation marks equivalent to the English ones, 『 』 and 「 」, are standard, although “, ”, “, and ” are commonly used.

See also

• Chinese punctuation
• Japanese punctuation

External links

• (in Korean) Guidelines from the National Institute of the Korean Language, Republic of Korea.