Culture ministry marks centenary of Hangul Day with conference on Korean language's next 100 years

The culture ministry will hold an academic conference at the National Museum of Korea on Oct. 12 marking the 100th anniversary of the establishment of Hangul Day, bringing together researchers and officials to discuss the next century of the Korean alphabet and language.

The conference, organized by the ministry with the Korean Language and Culture Institute Association, takes the theme "A Milestone of 100 Years of Hangul Day — Hangul Beyond Borders, Opening the Future of Korean." It will open with a keynote lecture by Kim Ju-won, president of the Hangul Society, on the economic value of Hangul.

The first session, "The Next 100 Years of Hangul, Beyond Borders to the World," will examine how global interest in Korean can be sustained. Jieun Kiaer, a professor of Oriental studies at Oxford University, will discuss the formation and development of global Korean, including Korean entries in the Oxford English Dictionary. Ahn Soong-beom, a professor at Kyung Hee University and director of the K-Culture and Story Contents Research Institute, will analyze how the worldwide spread of the Korean Wave affects the globalization of the Korean language.

The second session, "Digital Convergence and Evolution: Hangul and Korean in the Era of Large-Scale Artificial Intelligence," will look at how Korean can develop as a major language in the digital ecosystem. Kim Han-saem, a professor at Yonsei University's Language and Information Research Institute, will speak on building Korean-language corpora and the evolution of Hangul processing. Lee Jin-sik, a leader at LG's artificial intelligence research center, will address sovereign AI and national language sovereignty, focusing on high-quality Korean data and the technological challenges facing Korean-language large models.

Park Jin-ho, a professor of Korean language and literature at Seoul National University, will chair a panel discussion drawing together specialists on AI, Korean globalization and language policy from the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, the National Institute of Korean Language, the Korea Culture and Tourism Institute and the ministry.

Kim Young-soo, the ministry's first vice minister, said he hopes the event will serve as a meaningful opportunity to explore how Hangul and Korean can grow into a script and language that communicate with the world.

Government and local officials, researchers, students and members of the public may attend, with advance registration open until Oct. 8.