The National Institute of Korean Language (NIKL; ) is a language regulator of the Korean language based in Seoul, South Korea. It was created on January 23, 1991, by Presidential Decree No. 13163 (November 14, 1990). It has previously gone by a number of names, including the Academy of the Korean Language when it was first founded as a non-government organization in 1984, and the National Academy of the Korean Language when it became a government agency in 1991. It received its current Korean name in 2004 and its current English name in 2015. Within the NIKL is the Center for Teaching and Learning Korean.

Services

Standard Korean Language Dictionary

On January 1, 1992, it began work on compiling the Standard Korean Language Dictionary (SKLD). It published the dictionary on October 11, 1999 in three volumes. It published a revised and online version on October 8, 2008.

Korean-Foreign Language Learners' Dictionary

The NIKL maintains a number of online foreign language dictionaries for a variety of languages, including English, Russian, Vietnamese, Arabic, and Indonesian.

Urimalsaem

Urimalsaem is an online, open source, and collaborative dictionary that users can edit in a manner similar to how Wikipedia operates, albeit with individual edits reviewed by experts. It was launched on October 5, 2016, with an initial set of 1,109,722 headwords.

Datasets

The NIKL maintains several datasets for use in research, one of which consists of 3,515,010 news articles in Korean from 2009 to 2018. The dataset has been used in a number of papers on natural language processing and machine learning, and have even had derivative datasets created based on them. In 2015, shortly before the 2016 Korean Sign Language Act, the NIKL began collecting a dataset for Korean Sign Language called the KSL Corpus Project. In 2022, it announced that it had collected 180 hours of language material from 148 deaf people at five locations, and was continuing to collect more.

History

The NIKL was originally founded at a non-governmental level as the Academy of the Korean Language on May 1, 1984. It was established as a subsidiary of the Korean Ministry of Culture on January 23, 1991 under the name National Academy of the Korean Language. It took its original name again on November 11, 2005, and again changed its name to its current form in October 2015. On January 18, 2022, the NIKL announced several new initiatives: