The Korean Alphabet, DPRK-Style: 40 Letters, Names and Order

14 October 2026 · KoryoTalk · 6 min read

Short answer: the Korean alphabet is a phonetic script created in the 15th century; North Korea calls it 조선글 (joseongul), not 한글. The Northern norm counts 40 letters (19 consonants and 21 vowels) where the South teaches 24 basic letters plus compounds. The letter names differ too: the North says 기윽, 디읃, 시읏 where the South says 기역, 디귿, 시옷. The letter order is fixed in clause 1 of the Northern rulebook 조선말규범집 (1987 edition).

조선글, not 한글: why the DPRK renamed the alphabet

The script was created by Sejong (세종), the fourth ruler of the Joseon dynasty, who promulgated the 훈민정음 (“Hunminjeongeum”, “Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People”) in 1446. The invention was renamed several times — 정음, 언문 — before the early 20th-century scholarship of 주시경 popularized the name 한글, which the South made official.

The DPRK built its norm around the word 조선 — the North's own name for the country and the language: the language is 조선어 or 조선말, and the alphabet is 조선글, short for 조선글자, “Joseon letters”. The Northern dictionary lists 조선글 as a word in its own right. “Korean alphabet” in a Northern text is therefore 조선글 — and that word alone tells you which norm wrote the textbook.

40 letters instead of 24: how the North counts

The South teaches 24 basic letters (14 consonants, 10 vowels) and pushes the tense consonants and compound vowels into an appendix of “additional” signs. The Northern rulebook 조선말규범집 does the opposite: clause 1 lists all 40 jamo in one series, with the tense consonants ㄲ ㄸ ㅃ ㅆ ㅉ and the compound vowels ㅐ ㅔ ㅘ and the rest as full letters with names of their own. The logic is sound-based: if ㄲ is a distinct sound (tense kk), it gets a distinct letter. The Southern account treats the same signs as “doubled” forms: 쌍기역, “double 기역”.

So even the count is norm-relative: “24 letters” is the Southern answer, “40 letters” the Northern one. Both are correct — under their own rules.

Consonant order: the Northern table

The North places the tense consonants not beside their plain pairs but at the end of the list, after ㅎ — and names them with the prefix 된- (“thick”, tense):

The Southern contrast: there the order runs ㄱ, ㄲ, ㄴ, ㄷ, ㄸ … ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ, ㅎ (tense consonants next to their plain pairs), and ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅅ are called 기역, 디귿, 시옷. The Northern names 기윽, 디읃, 시읏 are exactly the “regularized” forms the South abandoned in 1933 for the sake of a historical tradition.

Vowel order: 21 letters

The Northern count has 21 vowels, and the compounds follow the basic ten immediately — again sorted by sound family:

The simple vowels are named by their sound: 아, 야, 어, 여, 오, 요, 우, 유, 으, 이 — identical in both norms. What differs is position: the South appends every compound vowel to the end of its list (…ㅣ, ㅐ, ㅒ, ㅔ … ㅢ), while the North slots them “by family” right after the basic ten.

Why a translator should care

Letter names and alphabet order are an early marker of the norm. A textbook or app that calls ㄱ “기역” and the tense consonants “쌍-” is teaching the Southern standard (표준어); the Northern 문화어 says 기윽 and 된기윽. From there the divergences chain up: the initial-sound rule 두음법칙 produces 녀자 instead of 여자 and 로씨야 instead of 러시아, and vocabulary — 동무 instead of 친구. The full picture is in “North Korean vs South Korean: one language or two?”.

Test yourself: the three probe words 녀자, 로씨야, 동무 are translated “Southern” by most services. That is how the KoryoTalk bot is built: a shared Korean–Russian dictionary base of 2.2 million entries plus a separately curated layer of verified Northern equivalents, each word cross-checked against two independent sources. Translate by text and voice right in Telegram.

Fact-checking: the Northern words in this article — 조선글, 훈민정음, 세종, 한글, the jamo names, 기윽, 니은, 디읃, 리을, 미음, 비읍, 시읏, 이응, 지읒, 치읓, 키읔, 티읕, 피읖, 히읗, 된기윽, 된디읃, 된비읍, 된시읏, 된지읒, 아, 야, 여, 유, 으, 이, 에, 문화어, 표준어, 발음, 글자, 규범 — are confirmed against the KoryoTalk dictionary base; the Southern names 기역/디귿/시옷 and the 1933 order follow the National Institute of Korean Language reference (korean.go.kr). The composition and order of the 40 jamo follow the text of 조선말규범집 (1987 edition, clause 1; full text published by TUFS: tufs.ac.jp/ts/personal/choes/korean/nanboku/gyubeom87_1.html); 조선글 is additionally confirmed in the KoryoTalk verified lexicon (two independent sources). Southern forms appear intentionally as counterexamples.