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‘Loanword Transcription Rules’ section open

I have added a new section on the website with the English translation of the Loanword Transcription Rules (외래어 표기법 外來語表記法 Oeraeeo Pyogibeop), the official regulations in South Korea for transcribing other languages into hangul, the Korean alphabet. This is quite possibly the first time that translations of these rules are appearing in English anywhere.

These rules are by no means perfect, and suffer from quite a few ambiguities and inconsistencies. For now, they are presented without commentary for the most part, since I thought it was most important to get these translations out there in the first place.

There is a lot of linguistic research done on Korean loanword adaptation, but it is usually not clear if these studies take into account the influence that official language policies in South Korea have in how loanwords are adapted. I hope these translations can help inform future researchers.

If anyone is curious how something should be transcribed in Korean using these rules, feel free to ask me here or on my Facebook page.

 

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