Culture ministry names 10 honorees for Hangul development awards

The culture ministry said Tuesday it has selected eight individuals and two organizations as this year's Hangul development award recipients, honoring work that ranges from building the foundations of Korean typography to teaching the language across Central Asia, Japan, Australia and Southeast Asia.

Awards will be presented at the 580th Hangul Day celebration at the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts in Jongno-gu, Seoul, at 10 a.m. on Oct. 9.

The top honor, the Silver Crown Order of Cultural Merit, will be awarded posthumously to Seok Geum-ho, former chairman of the board of the typeface company Sandoll. Seok founded Sandoll in the face of a publishing industry that still relied on imported Japanese type, and over four decades developed and distributed roughly 1,000 Korean typefaces.

Baek Tae-hyun, 65, vice president of the Korean University in Central Asia, will receive the Gold Crown Order of Cultural Merit for about 30 years of Korean-language education and research on ethnic Koreans in the region, work that included leading the founding of two Korean universities in Kyrgyzstan.

The two Cultural Meritorious Awards go to Cho Su-jin, 56, president of the Mid-Central Korean School Association, and Choi Hong-sik, 73, president of the King Sejong Memorial Society. Cho was recognized for 28 years of Hangul education and cultural events for Korean-American students, and Choi for research on Hunminjeongeum phonetics and its letter-creation principles.

Presidential citations will go to Lee Young-jun, 58, a professor at Hirosaki University in Japan, who organized the "Let's Speak Korean Together" Aomori competition for 21 years with more than 2,100 participants; the Tashkent Weekend Hangul School, which has run since 1997 for ethnic Korean children in Uzbekistan; and the Korean Studies Center at the Australian National University, which the ministry said is the only institution in Oceania to have established a Korean-language major.

Prime minister's citations go to Kim Kyung-suk, 67, president of the Korea Speech and Oratory Association, who grew the World Korean Speech Contest into an event with participants from 30 countries; Laura Tamosiuniene, 69, an associate professor at Mykolas Romeris University in Lithuania, who led the first Sejong Institute in the Baltic region and opened Lithuania's first undergraduate Korean studies program; and Jee Seo-won, 50, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore, who set up a Korean-language course with more than 1,000 students a year and institutionalized a Korean minor.

The awards fall in the year marking the 580th anniversary of the promulgation of Hunminjeongeum and the 100th anniversary of the establishment of Hangul Day. The ministry said it is running its 2026 Hangul Week events around the same period.

"Long efforts by the awardees made Hangul something that is used in diverse ways in daily life and that leads to learning in places around the world," said Myung Soo-hyun, cultural policy director at the ministry. "The culture ministry will steadily support education and exchange activities that cultivate the value of Hangul and connect people who want to learn Korean."