South Korea has long felt under-recognized for its many achievements: It built an economic powerhouse from the ruins of a vicious war in just decades and, after years of authoritarian rule, has created one of Asia’s most vibrant democracies.
Now, one South Korean woman, Lee Ki-nam, is determined to wring more recognition from the world with an unusual export: the Korean alphabet. Lee is using a fortune she made in real estate to try to take the alphabet to places where native peoples lack indigenous written systems to record their languages.
Her project had its first success — and generated headlines — in July, when children from an Indonesian tribe began learning the Korean alphabet, called Hangul.
“I am doing for the world’s nonwritten languages what Doctors Without Borders is doing in medicine,” Lee, 75, said in an interview. “There are thousands of such languages. I aim to bring Hangul to all of them.”
While her quest might seem quixotic to non-Koreans, in this country — which has a national holiday called Hangul Day — it is viewed with enormous pride. Newspapers have gushed, and a Korean political party praised her feat in Indonesia — which Lee says involves just 50 children so far — as “a heroic first step toward globalizing Hangul.”
Such effusiveness is tied to Koreans’ attachment to their alphabet — a distinctive combination of circles and lines — and what they believe its endurance says about them as a people. During decades of Japanese colonial rule in the past century, Koreans were banned from using their language and alphabet in business and other official settings; schools were forbidden from teaching the language. Illiteracy in Korean soared, but many Koreans broke the rules to teach the language to their children and others.
Lee’s father, a linguist and professor, secretly taught his children and other students the language. She sees her mission as honoring his legacy, honoring Korea and helping the world.
Kim Ju-won, a linguist at Seoul National University and the president of the Hunminjeongeum Society, which Lee established to propagate Hangul, summarized the mission this way: “By giving unwritten languages their own alphabets, we can help save them from extinction and thus ensure mankind’s linguistic and cultural diversity.”
Still, the country’s linguistic ambitions have already raised some concerns, not long after some Muslim countries complained about South Korea’s missionary zeal in trying to spread Christianity.
In Indonesia, where the government is encouraging its 240 million people to learn a “language of unity,” Bahasa Indonesia, for effective communication among a vast array of ethnic groups, Lee’s project raises delicate issues.
“If this is a kind of hobby, that’s fine,” Nicholas Dammen, the Indonesian ambassador to South Korea, said recently, referring to the decision by the Cia-Cia ethnic minority to adopt Hangul. “But they don’t need to import the Hangul characters. They can always write their local languages in the Roman characters.”
Shin Eun-hyang, an official at the Korean language division of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism in Seoul, said: “This is diplomatically sensitive. The government is limited in how much direct support it can provide to such projects.”
The government says it does not provide money to Lee’s group, but she said it offered indirect support by giving linguists grants to pursue their work, which can include teaching Hangul abroad.
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