Samsung Electronics switched the default keyboard to "QWERTY" starting with the Galaxy S24 series released last year. It had used the self-developed "Cheonjiin" as the default, but adopted QWERTY in response to Generation Z's view that it is familiar and convenient.
People feel familiar with QWERTY because its layout matches the national standard two-set Korean keyboard for computers. The United States developed QWERTY in the 1800s and spread it worldwide. The Korean government then adopted the two-set layout in 1982 as the standard for Hangul keyboards. The two-set layout is similar to QWERTY in that the left hand enters consonants and the right hand enters vowels. The number and symbol layouts are also almost the same.
Korea began grappling with Hangul keyboard layouts in the 1950s as typewriters became widespread. English strings alphabets in a row to form words and compose sentences. In contrast, Hangul uses a "combinational" system in which an initial consonant, medial vowel, and final consonant join to form a single syllable block. Also, while English has 26 letters, Hangul includes double consonants such as ㅃ, ㄲ, ㅆ and compound vowels formed by combining vowels such as ㅟ and ㅘ, bringing the number of syllables that must be enterable to more than 10,000.
The two-set keyboard layers Hangul consonants and vowels on top of QWERTY. As a result, new methods were introduced to represent the larger number of Korean syllables compared with English. For example, to enter a double consonant, the user presses the consonant together with Shift. For compound vowels made by combining multiple vowels, the user presses each vowel one by one.
Another feature of the two-set keyboard is that frequently used characters are grouped on the second row. For example, among consonants, the commonly used ㅁ, ㄴ, ㅇ, ㄹ, ㅎ are on the left second row, and among vowels, ㅗ, ㅓ, ㅏ, ㅣ are on the right second row. They are placed in the middle so that fingers do not have to travel far.
As manufacturers unified previously different keyboard layouts, people could quickly adapt to any computer they bought. Standardizing the keyboard accelerated the spread of computers and the pace of digitization.
Meanwhile, in the 1990s, when computers became widespread, a problem emerged in which Hangul stored in electronic documents became garbled. To fix this, work advanced on the "Unicode" standard, which manages all the world's scripts with standardized codes. Korea joined the project, set a national standard code that recognizes 11,172 modern Hangul syllables as individual characters, and had it reflected in the international standard. Later, old Hangul and dialectal notation were also included.