South Korea has long felt under-recognized for its many achievements: it built an economic powerhouse from the ruins of a vicious war in just decades and, after years of authoritarian rule, has created one of Asia's most vibrant democracies.
Now, one South Korean woman, Lee Ki-nam, is determined to wring more recognition from the world with an unusual export: the Korean alphabet. Ms. Lee is using a fortune she made in real estate to try to take the alphabet to places where native peoples lack indigenous written systems to record their languages.
Her project had its first success -- and generated headlines -- in July, when children from an Indonesian tribe began learning the Korean alphabet, called Hangul.
"I am doing for the world's nonwritten languages what Doctors Without Borders is doing in medicine," Ms. Lee, 75, said in an interview. "There are thousands of such languages. I aim to bring Hangul to all of them."
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