Appendix · Additional Notes

14. Frequency analysis of modern Hangul usage

    The National Institute of the Korean Language conducted a
    large-scale analysis of modern Korean language usage based
    on a corpus of approximately 3 million word tokens. This
    report includes a variety of linguistic analyses from a Korean
    computational linguistics perspective. In connection with the
    phoneme system of the Hunminjeongeum Haeryebon, the
    report presents frequency data for both vowels and
    consonants.
    In the statistics for syllable-initial consonants (onsets), the
    order of usage frequency of three Hasattang consonants are
    ㅇ,ㅅ, and ㅁ. Among the five major sound categories of the
    Haeryebon, throat sounds (water) and tongue sounds (fire)
    are considered the most fundamental, which is proven in this
    report. Statistically, these categories account for 30% and
    23.8% of usage, respectively.
    For medial vowels (nucleus), the base vowels ㅣ and ㅡ
    make up 28%, while the core primary vowels ㅏㅓㅗ ㅜ (first
    born) account for 49%. Combined, these two groups
    represent 77% of all vowel use. In contrast, the palatalized
    second-born vowels ㅑㅕㅛㅠ comprise only 7%, with ㅕ
    alone accounting for 4.76%. Altogether, the ten basic vowels



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