For the Korean language, South Korea mainly uses a combination of East Asian and European punctuation, while North Korea uses more of the East Asian punctuation style.

Traditional punctuation

In the traditional Korean system of writing, which was largely based on the Chinese writing system, punctuation was primarily used to make corrections or to help with the understanding of hanja, or Chinese characters. Some of the corrective punctuation marks included ⟨◦⟩ called 끼움표 (kki-umpyo), which was used for inserting, and ⟨▯⟩ called 삭제부 (sakjebu) which was used for deleting. The traditional writing system known as gugyeol, used punctuation to interpret Chinese characters in a way Korean speakers could understand. One of the marks used in gugyeol was a dot ⟨•⟩ called 역독점 (yeokdokjeom), which was used to indicate reading order. The conclusion of an idea or thought was indicated by starting a new line of characters from the top, as opposed to the western style punctuation of periods and commas which had not been introduced yet.

Modern punctuation

The modern Korean punctuation system is largely based on European punctuation, with the use of periods (마침표, machimpyo), commas (쉼표, swimpyo), and question marks (물음표, mul-eumpyo). Modern Korean is typically written horizontally using European punctuation. However, when it is written vertically, Korean writing tends to follow East Asian punctuation which includes ⟨. ⟩ (고리점, goricheom) as a period, ⟨、⟩ (모점, mocheom) as a comma, and ⟨『...』⟩ (겹낫표, gyeomnatpyo) as quotation marks.

Differences from European punctuation

North-South differences

In the North, guillemets 《 and 》 are the symbols used for quotes; in the South, quotation marks are equivalent to the English ones. 『 』 and 「 」, are standard, although “, ”, “, and ” are commonly used.