The following tables of

consonants In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

and

vowels A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...

(''jamo'') of the

Korean alphabet The Korean alphabet is the modern writing system for the Korean language. In North Korea, the alphabet is known as (), and in South Korea, it is known as (). The letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs ...

(''

Hangul The Korean alphabet is the modern writing system for the Korean language. In North Korea, the alphabet is known as (), and in South Korea, it is known as (). The letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs ...

'') display (in blue) the basic forms in the first row and their derivatives in the following row(s). They are divided into initials (leading consonants), vowels (middle), and finals tables (trailing consonants). The ''jamo'' shown below are individually

romanized In linguistics, romanization is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and transcription, ...

according to the Revised Romanization of Hangeul (''RR Transliteration''), which is a system of

transliteration Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus '' trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → and → the digraph , Cyrillic → , Armenian → or L ...

rules between the Korean and Roman alphabets, originating from

South Korea South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the southern half of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and borders North Korea along the Korean Demilitarized Zone, with the Yellow Sea to the west and t ...

. However, the tables below are not sufficient for normal transcription of the

Korean language Korean is the first language, native language for about 81 million people, mostly of Koreans, Korean descent. It is the national language of both South Korea and North Korea. In the south, the language is known as () and in the north, it is kn ...

as the overarching ''Revised Romanization of Korean'' system takes contextual sound changes into account.

Leading consonants

Called ''choseong'', or "initials", there are 19 initial consonants, whereof one (ㅇ) is silent, and five (ㄲ, ㄸ, ㅃ, ㅆ, ㅉ) are doubled:

Medial vowels

Called ''jungseong'', or "vowels", there are 21 medial vowels:

Trailing consonants

Called ''jongseong'', or "finals", there are 27 final consonants; with the additional case of ''no final consonant'', there is a total of 28 possibilities:

Collation

Several

collation Collation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. Many systems of collation are based on numerical order or alphabetical order, or extensions and combinations thereof. Collation is a fundamental element of most office fi ...

sequences are used to order words (like alphabetical sorting). The North and South differ on (a) the treatment of composite jamo consonants in syllable-leading (''choseong'') and -trailing (''jongseong'') position, and (b) on the treatment of composite jamo vowels in syllable-medial (''jungseong'') position. This first sequence is official in South Korea (and is the basic binary order of codepoints in Unicode): Sequences of this second type are common in North Korea:

Letter names

Consonants

* Consonant names in the 15th century seem to have ended in a vowel (without adding the last consonant repeating a shortened version of the initial), judging from 1451 Hunmin Jeongeum Eonhae's forms such as "", which may have been pronounced ''geuneun''.

Vowels

The "names" of the vowels are given according to the sound they make (their pronunciation). To be technical, the silent consonant would be added before the sound (e.g., ㅏ becomes 아).

Hangul syllables

With 19 possible initial consonants, 21 possible medial (one- or two-letter) vowels, and 28 possible final consonants (of which one corresponds to the case of no final consonant), there are a total of ''theoretically'' possible "Korean syllable letters" (), which are contiguously encoded in the 11,172 Unicode code points from U+AC00 (Decimal: ) through U+D7A3 (Decimal: = 44,032 + 11,171) within the

Hangul Syllables Hangul Syllables is a Unicode block containing precomposed Hangul syllable blocks for modern Korean. The syllables Korean language and computers#Hangul in Unicode, can be directly mapped by algorithm to sequences of two or three characters in th ...

Unicode block. However, the majority of these theoretically possible syllables do not correspond to syllables found in actual Korean words or proper names. Jump to tables with initial letter:

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hangul Consonant And Vowel Tables Consonant and vowel tables