100th Anniversary of Hangeul Day's Establishment: Culture Ministry Hosts Conference on the Future of Hangeul and Korean in the AI Era

Discussing the Globalization of Korean and Data Competitiveness in the AI Era

The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korean Language Culture Center Association will hold an academic conference at 1:30 p.m. on October 12 in the small auditorium of the National Museum of Korea in Yongsan-gu, Seoul, to mark the 100th anniversary of the establishment of Hangeul Day.

Held under the theme "Milestones in 100 Years of Hangeul: Beyond Boundaries, Opening the Future of the Korean Language," the conference will explore the direction Hangeul and the Korean language should take over the next 100 years amid the global spread of K-culture and advances in artificial intelligence (AI). It will also focus on strategies for expanding Korean into a global language and ways to secure Korean-language data and technological competitiveness in the AI era.

The conference will begin with a keynote address by Kim Juwon, president of the Korean Language Society. Kim will discuss not only the linguistic and writing-system value of Hangeul, but also its "economic value" and contribution to Korea's economic development. Park Jinho, a professor in the Department of Korean Language and Literature at Seoul National University, will then chair the presentations and panel discussion.

The first topic is "The Next 100 Years of Hangeul: Beyond Boundaries and Into the World." Jieun Cho, a professor in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford, will present strategies for the formation and development of "global Korean," citing examples such as Korean words included in the Oxford English Dictionary. Ahn Soongbeom, a professor in the Department of Korean Language and Literature at Kyung Hee University, will analyze how the worldwide consumption and spread of the Korean Wave are affecting the globalization of Hangeul.

The second topic will address the Korean language in the AI era. Kim Hansam, a professor at Yonsei University's Institute of Language and Information Studies, will discuss the development of Korean-language corpora and the future of Hangeul processing technology. Lee Jinsik, a leader at LG AI Research, will present the challenges and prospects for Korean large language models (LLMs) and sovereign AI. Participants will also discuss ways to secure high-quality Korean-language data and strengthen the language's digital competitiveness.

Representatives from the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), the National Institute of Korean Language, and the Korea Culture and Tourism Institute, as well as Korean-language education experts, will take part in the panel discussion to discuss the globalization of Korean and the direction of language policy in the AI era.

Kim Youngsoo, First Vice Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism, will attend the conference and encourage the organizers. "I hope this conference, held to mark the 100th anniversary of the establishment of Hangeul Day, will be a meaningful opportunity to explore how Hangeul and the Korean language can grow into a writing system and language that connect with the world in an era of globalization and artificial intelligence," he said.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.