Late Sandoll founder Seok Geum-ho among recipients of hangul development honors

People who have dedicated themselves to advancing hangul and the Korean language — through font development, global outreach and academic research — will receive government honors this week.

The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism announced Tuesday that it has selected eight individuals and two organizations as recipients of the 2026 Hangul Development Merit Awards. The honors — comprising one Silver Crown Order of Cultural Merit, one Jade Crown Order of Cultural Merit, two Cultural Commendations, three Presidential Commendations and three Prime Ministerial Commendations — will be presented Friday at the 580th Hangul Day ceremony at the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts.

The Silver Crown Order of Cultural Merit will be posthumously awarded to the late Seok Geum-ho (1955–2024), founder of the font company Sandoll. Seok founded Sandoll after growing frustrated with the widespread practice of importing Japanese typesetting materials for use in Korean-language publishing in the early 1980s. Over more than four decades, he developed and distributed more than 1,000 hangul typefaces, laying the groundwork for diverse Korean-language expression in computing environments and helping establish hangul's cultural and artistic identity.

The Jade Crown Order of Cultural Merit goes to Baek Tae-hyeon, 65, vice president of the Korean University in Central Asia. Baek spent roughly 30 years promoting Korean-language education and research on the Koryo-saram community at universities across Central Asia. He led the founding of two Korean universities in Kyrgyzstan, expanded educational infrastructure through international cooperation programs and devoted himself to training the next generation of Korean studies specialists.

The Cultural Commendation will be awarded to Cho Su-jin, 56, president of the Korean School Association in the Mid-Atlantic and Eastern United States, who over 28 years developed Korean-language curricula for overseas Korean students in the United States; and Choe Hong-sik, 73, chairman of the King Sejong Memorial Society, who has promoted the academic value of hangul through writings on the phonetics of Hunminjeongeum and interdisciplinary research into the principles behind its creation.

Presidential Commendations will go to Lee Yeong-jun, 58, a professor at Hirosaki University, who has organized the "Let's Speak Korean Together" Aomori competition since 2005 — drawing more than 2,100 participants in total through 2025 and spreading Korean language and culture across northeastern Japan; the Tashkent Weekend Hangul School, which since 1997 has provided hangul and ethnic identity education, including hangul writing contests, for children of overseas Koreans in Uzbekistan; and the Korean Studies Institute at the Australian National University, which established the only Korean-language major program in Oceania and over nine years has expanded the foundation for learning and researching hangul culture in Australia through hangul school support, literary translation workshops and scholarship exchange programs.

The Prime Ministerial Commendation recipients are Kim Gyeong-seok, 67, chairman of the Korea Speech and Oratory Association, who helped grow the World Korean Language Oratory Competition into an international forum drawing participants from 30 countries; Lora Tamošiūnienė, 69, associate professor at Mykolas Romeris University, who served as the first director of a King Sejong Institute in the Baltic region, won the institute's excellence award twice and established Lithuania's first bachelor's program in Korean studies; and Ji Seo-won, 50, associate professor at the National University of Singapore, who as the inaugural coordinator of Korean-language education at the university created a Korean-language course now enrolling more than 1,000 students annually and institutionalized a Korean-language minor degree program.

Myeong Su-hyeon, the ministry's director of cultural policy, said the honorees' years of effort had made hangul a vibrant part of everyday life and a subject of study around the world. "The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism will consistently support education and exchange activities that nurture the value of hangul and connect those who wish to learn Korean," Myeong said.