South Korea has long felt under-recognised for its many achievements: it built an economic powerhouse from the ruins of a war in just decades and, after years of authoritarian rule, has created one of Asia’s most vibrant democracies.

Now, a South Korean woman, Lee Ki-nam, is determined to wring more recognition from the world with an unusual export: the Korean alphabet. 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 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,” Lee, 75, said in an interview. “There are thousands of such languages. I aim to bring Hangul to all of them.”

While her quest might seem quixotic to non-Koreans, in this country it is viewed with enormous pride. Newspapers have gushed, and a Korean political party praised her feat in Indonosia — which Lee says involves just 50 children so far — as “a heroic first step toward globalising Hangul”.

Such effusiveness is tied to Koreans’ attachment to their alphabet and what they believe its endurance says about them as a people. During Japanese colonial rule in the past century, Koreans were prohibited from using their language and alphabet in business and other official settings; schools were forbidden to teach the language.

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