How to Say “Hello” and “Thank You” in Korean — and Why There Are Two Answers

October 26, 2026 · KoryoTalk · 6 min read

Short answer: “hello in Korean” has two correct answers. South Korea says 안녕하세요, the DPRK says 안녕하십니까. Textbooks, phrasebooks and machine translators answer with the southern norm almost every time, simply because southern Korean text dominates the internet by orders of magnitude. If the phrase is meant for the North Korean side, build it in the DPRK norm and check it against the marker words. For a quick check there is the KoryoTalk bot: a dictionary base of 2.2 million Korean–Russian entries plus a separately collected layer of northern correspondences.

One question — two answers

“How to say X in Korean” questions are the most common among beginners: hello, thank you, good morning, my name is. The catch: “Korean” is not one norm. The language is one, but the DPRK writes it as 문화어 and South Korea as 표준어, and the differences go beyond spelling: politeness forms, forms of address, whole words. More on that in “one language, two norms”.

The practical consequence: before memorizing a phrase, decide who it is addressed to. A southern form in a message to a DPRK reader reads as a text “not from here” — like a business letter in Russian with someone else’s dialect forms.

Common phrases: the two norms side by side

* The southern column is given as marked counterexamples for comparison, not for use in texts for the DPRK. Compound forms in the northern column (좋은 아침입니다, 이름은 …입니다, 몸 조심하십시오) are built from checked words: 좋다, 아침, 이름, 이다, 몸, 조심, 하다; the forms 감사합니다/고맙습니다/옳습니다/아름답습니다 are politeness forms of the checked lemmas 감사, 고맙다, 옳다, 아름답다.

Northern politeness: -습니까 endings and the address 동무

The northern norm leans on the bookish endings -습니까 / -십니까 in questions and -습니다 / -십니다 in statements: 안녕하십니까 “hello”, 고맙습니다 “thank you”, 옳습니다 “that’s right”. Southern speech in the same situations prefers the conversational -요. The second marker is the address 동무 “comrade”: in the DPRK it is a live neutral address, in South Korea it reads as an archaism. If a translator flags 동무 as obsolete, it is looking at the language through southern eyes. To read phrases one by one is slow; what matters is the system of markers that identifies the norm at a glance (로동자 vs 노동자, 력사 vs 역사) — see how to tell which Korean you are reading.

How to build a phrase in the DPRK norm

The order is the same as in translating Russian into Korean: audience → norm → word order (subject → object → predicate) → marker check. For a one-off phrase the fastest way is to ask a tool with a northern base: KoryoTalk is a bot translator of North Korean (조선말): a dictionary base of 2.2 million Korean–Russian entries plus a separately collected layer of northern correspondences. Type “good morning” or a whole greeting — get the phrase in the northern norm. Open the KoryoTalk bot.

Conclusion

“How to say hello in Korean” is a question with two answers: southern 안녕하세요 and northern 안녕하십니까. Thank you is 감사합니다 in both norms, but “right” in the North is 옳소, and the address is 동무. The choice of a form starts with the choice of the audience; a ready phrase is checked against the marker words of the northern norm.