Korean uses a unique script called hangul. It is unique in that, although it is a syllabic script, the individual phonemes within a syllable are represented by individual shapes. The example shows how the word ‘ta-kuk-o’ is composed of 7 jamos, each expressing a single phoneme. The jamos are displayed as part of a two dimensional syllabic character.

Note that the initial jamo in the last syllable is not pronounced in initial position and serves purely to conform to the rule that hangul syllables always begin with a consonant.

It is possible to store hangul text as either jamos or syllabic characters in Unicode, although the latter is more common. Unicode enables both approaches.

South Korea also mixes ideographic characters borrowed from Chinese with hangul, though on nothing like the scale of Japanese. In fact, it is quite normal to find whole documents without any hanja, as the ideographic characters in Korean are called.

There are about 2,300 hangul characters in everyday use, but the Unicode Standard has code points for around 11,000.