There are three commonly used romanization schemes for the Korean Hangul script, namely:

• Revised Romanization of Korean: official in South Korea since 2000 and quite common on the Internet;
• McCune-Reischauer: formerly official in South Korea and a variation of which is currently official in North Korea, and common in popular literature;
• Yale Romanization: used mainly in linguistics.

In addition to these, many people spell their names or other words in an ad hoc manner, irrespective of any system such as the three listed above. For more details, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Korean).

Differences between the systems

The first two systems vary mainly in the choice of how to represent certain Hangul letters: both are phonetic systems, and try to represent Korean words as they are pronounced. Thus, the same Hangul letter may be represented by different roman letters, depending on its pronunciation in context. The Yale system, on the other hand, attempts to represent words not as they are pronounced, but as they are spelled. Thus, the same Hangul letter is always represented by the same roman letter, regardless of the Hangul letter's pronunciation.

See also

• List of Korea-related topics

External links

• Comparison tables of the different systems:
  • From UN Working Group on Romanization Systems (PDF file)
  • From a translating firm