Chinese and Korean punctuation

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Please improve this article if you can (May 2007).
See also: Japanese punctuation

Chinese and Korean use a different set of punctuation marks from European languages. These came into use relatively recently; the ancient forms of these languages had no punctuation at all. Traditional poetry and calligraphy maintains the punctuation-free style.

Nearly all East Asian punctuation marks are larger than their European counterparts and occupy a square area that is the same size as the characters around them. These punctuation marks are called fullwidth to contrast them from halfwidth European punctuation marks.

Korean and Traditional Chinese can be written horizontally or vertically, while Simplified Chinese is rarely written vertically. Some punctuation marks adapt to this change in direction: the parentheses, curved brackets, square quotation marks (Traditional Chinese), book title marks (Chinese), ellipsis mark and dash all rotate 90° when used in vertical text. The three underline-like punctuation marks in Chinese (proper noun mark, wavy book title mark, and emphasis mark) rotate and shift to the left side of the text in vertical script (shifting to the right side of the text is also possible, but this is outmoded and can clash with the placement of other punctuation marks).

There are major differences between European and Chinese/Korean punctuation marks.

  • Other punctuation marks are more different, in shape or usage:
  • The Chinese full stop is a fullwidth small circle (。), called 句号 (jùhào). In horizontal writing, the full stop is placed in the same position as it would be in English; in vertical writing, it is placed below and to the right of the last character.
    • In Traditional Chinese, the double and single quotation marks are fullwidth 『 』 and 「 」. The double quotation marks are used when embedded within single quotation marks: 「...『...』...」.
      • In Traditional Chinese, European-style quotation marks “” and ‘’ can also be used for horizontal text. In Simplified Chinese, only the European-style quotation marks are used. Here, the single quotation marks are used when embedded within double quotation marks: “…‘…’…”. These quotation marks are fullwidth in printed matter but share the same codepoints as the European quotation marks in Unicode, so they require a Chinese-language font to be displayed correctly.
    • In Chinese, the fullwidth comma (，), called 逗號/逗号 (dòuhào), has the same shape as the European comma.
    • Chinese also has the enumeration comma (simplified Chinese: 顿号; traditional Chinese: 頓號; pinyin: dùnhào; literally "pause mark"), which must be used instead of the regular comma when separating words constituting a list. It is identical to the Japanese fullwidth comma (、).
    • Chinese uses a middle dot to separate words in a foreign name, since native first and last names in Chinese are not separated using any punctuation or spaces. For example, "Leonardo da Vinci" in Simplified Chinese: "列奥纳多·达·芬奇".

In Chinese, the middle dot is also fullwidth in printed matter, but the halfwidth middle dot (·) is used in computer input, which is then rendered as fullwidth in Chinese-language fonts.

    • For emphasis, Chinese uses emphasis marks instead of italic type. Each emphasis mark is a single dot placed under each character to be emphasized (for vertical text, the dot is placed to the left hand side of each character). Although frequent in printed matter, emphasis marks are rare online, as they cannot be represented as plain text, are not supported by HTML and most word processors, and otherwise inconvenient to input.
    • For book titles, Chinese uses fullwidth double book title marks, 《book title》, and fullwidth single book title marks, 〈book title〉. The latter is used when embedded within the former: 《...〈...〉...》; in Traditional Chinese, the latter is also used for articles in or sections of a book.
    • A proper noun mark (an underline) is occasionally used in Chinese, such as in teaching materials and some movie subtitles. For consistency in style, a wavy underline (﹏﹏) is used instead of the regular book title marks whenever the proper noun mark is used in the same text. When the text runs vertically, the proper name mark is written as a line to the left of the characters (to the right in some older books).
    • In Chinese, the ellipsis is written with six dots (not three) occupying the same space as two characters (……) in the center of the line. Similarly, the dash is written so that it occupies the space of two characters (——) in the center of the line. There should be no breaking in the line.
    • When connecting two words to signify a range, Chinese generally uses a fullwidth dash occupying the space of one character (—, e.g. 1月—7月 "January to July"). The wavy dash is also sometimes used in Chinese (extensively so in Taiwan), and often used in Korean.
    • While European languages use a narrow space between each letter, and a wider space between words, Chinese uses a narrow space both between characters and between words. In this way, it somewhat resembles the scriptio continua of ancient Greek and Latin.
      • There are a small number of exceptions. A modern example, found in Taiwan, is that of referring to Chiang Kai-shek as 先總統　蔣公 (Former President, Lord Chiang), where the space is an honorific marker for 蔣公; this use is also still current in very formal letters or other old-style documents.
      • Also, when Chinese is written entirely in Hanyu Pinyin or when Japanese is written entirely in kana, spaces are always introduced to assist in reading.
    • There is no equivalent of the apostrophe in Chinese.

For Korean, the third member language of CJK, South Korea currently uses mostly European punctuation, while North Korea uses slightly more East Asian punctuation. Differences from European punctuation include:

  • The middle dot (·) is used in short lists of similar items. For example: "사과·배·복숭아·수박은 모두 과일이다." Translation: "Apples, apple pears, peaches, and watermelons are all fruits."
  • Although the "correct" way of quoting is to use double quotation marks in South Korea and 〈…〉 in North Korea, fullwidth quotes such as 『…』 or 「…」 are commonly used in print.
  • Since Korean is agglutinative, rules regarding parentheses and spaces are different from European rules. For example, in the sentence "사과(沙果)는 과일이다", inserting a space in between other letters and the parentheses will be an error as 는 marks 사과 (apple) as the topic and is not a separate word.

Like Classical Chinese, traditional Mongolian employed no punctuation at all. But now, as it uses the Cyrillic alphabet, its punctuation is similar, if not identical, to Russian.

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