North Korean culture: a language standard enforced by law

How the northern standard language was made

Korean is the language of the whole country; Britannica describes the population as almost entirely Korean, with a small Chinese minority. What the state changed was the written and spoken standard. The Korean alphabet, called Chosŏn muntcha in the north and hangul in the south, has 10 vowels and 14 consonants, and since 1945 North Korean newspapers and books have been printed in it alone, without Chinese characters. A deliberate effort removed Chinese and Western loanwords along with what remained of the Japanese imposed under colonial rule, when Korean had been forbidden in schools, businesses and public places.

The record lists the result as a language of its own, the North Korean standard language. Since 2023 its boundary with the southern standard has been policed by law. The Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act, adopted on 18 January 2023, makes the use of South Korean vernacular a crime, with penalties that include death.

What the census found about schooling

The census of 2008, taken with the UN Population Fund, found literacy among people aged 10 and over at nearly 100% and school attendance between the ages of 5 and 16 at nearly 100% for both sexes, under eleven years of free compulsory education. Above secondary level the shares diverged: one man in seven over 16 had completed university, and one woman in twelve. Engineering, education, agriculture, health and business administration accounted for 72% of those with education beyond secondary school. Britannica describes twelve years of free compulsory schooling, one of them in preschool, combined with productive labour for every student, and Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang as the leading institution.

What North Koreans are allowed to believe

Confucian thought shaped Korean family life and values for centuries, with Buddhism behind it. Catholic missionaries arrived in the eighteenth century and Protestants in the nineteenth, and Pyongyang and Sunchon became centres of Christian activity; Pyongyang was called the "Jerusalem of the East". Chondogyo, the Teaching of the Heavenly Way, was founded by the Confucian teacher Ch'oe Che-u in 1860 as a blend of Buddhist, Confucian and Christian ideas, and it took a leading part in the March First Movement of 1919. Shamanism, older than all of them, has nearly died out in the north.

After the Korean War churches and temples were confiscated and many put to other uses. Article 68 of the constitution grants freedom of religious belief, and Britannica's assessment is that the state confirms the right on paper and does not practise it. Religious activity has stayed under state control; a party named after Chondogyo, the Chondoist Chongu Party, exists and accepts the leading role of the Workers' Party. Visitors are warned by the UK Foreign Office not to bring religious material into the country.

The family was reshaped as well. Britannica records that after 1945 the Soviet occupiers did not recognise the traditional Korean family system or Confucian philosophy, that old lineage records were burned and the kinship system broken, and that leisure has since been organised around group activities such as rallies and museum visits. The 2008 census still found extended families in 66% of households, at an average of 4.4 people, against 31.5% of nuclear families averaging 3.0.

How the state organises the arts

Every writer, artist, dancer and musician belongs to a state institution, among them the National Theatre for the Arts and the State Symphony Orchestra in Pyongyang. The party directs culture through its Propaganda and Agitation Department and the Culture and Arts Department of the Central Committee, and the General Federation of Korean Literature and Arts Unions is the parent body for all literary and artistic organisations.

The work carries three steady themes: martyrdom in the revolutionary struggle, the happiness of present society and the genius of the leader. Mansudae Art Studio, founded in 1959, employs around 1,000 artists producing paintings, murals, posters and monuments, and only licensed artists may portray the leaders, in what are classed as "Number One works". More than four million literary works were published between the 1980s and the early 2000s, almost all of them in a few political genres.

Which performances the state promotes

The five great revolutionary operas were developed from ch'angguk, the older Korean opera, and add traditional instruments to the orchestra. Sea of Blood has been performed more than 1,500 times since its premiere in 1971. Pop music arrived in the 1980s with the Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble and the Wangjaesan Light Music Band, and in 2014 the all-woman Moranbong Band was described as the most popular group in the country. Western classical music, Brahms and Tchaikovsky among it, is played by the State Symphony Orchestra; the New York Philharmonic performed in Pyongyang in February 2008 for an invited audience.

What the cinema is for

Film is treated as "the most powerful medium for educating the masses" and carries the same themes. Influential titles include An Jung-geun Shoots Ito Hirobumi, about the killing of Japan's resident-general in 1909, and The Flower Girl, the best known of the revolutionary works on screen and stage. Kim Jong Il took a close interest: he set out his rules for film-making in The Cinema and Directing in 1987, and in the 1980s he ordered the kidnapping of two South Korean film-makers, who were made to work for the North Korean studios. Most foreign films are shown only privately to senior party members.

The mass games are the form most associated with the country abroad. At the Arirang Mass Games some 100,000 performers took part in gymnastics and dance while another 40,000 formed a vast animated screen in the stands behind them, in the Rungrado May Day Stadium, which seats 114,000. Art propaganda squads tour farms and factories at harvest time and during "speed battles" to raise output.

How Pyongyang was rebuilt as a statement

Architecture is the most visible cultural form. Pyongyang was almost completely destroyed in the Korean War and rebuilt on a grand scale, with three kinds of major building: monuments, such as the Juche Tower, 170 metres high and completed for the founder's seventieth birthday in 1982, and an Arch of Triumph ten metres taller than its Parisian model; public buildings in modern construction under traditional tiled roofs, such as the Grand People's Study House and the People's Palace of Culture; and high-rise housing and hotels. The 105-storey Ryugyong Hotel, begun in 1987, stood unfinished for decades. In the countryside, Britannica records, the mud-walled, thatched houses of the past were replaced after the war by brick houses with tile or slate roofs, and wage earners are expected to live in apartment blocks, built almost entirely by the state. Beyond the capital the Reunification Highway runs 168 kilometres to Panmunjom through 21 tunnels and over 23 bridges, built, as much of the country's construction has been, with military labour.

What reaches people through the press and the screen

The Korean Central News Agency controls the flow of information. All 12 major newspapers and 20 periodicals are published in the capital, among them Rodong Sinmun of the party Central Committee and the government's Minju Choson. There are three state television stations, and most households receive radio through wired loudspeakers linked to village receivers. Freedom House reported in 2025 that smartphone users can reach a state intranet but not the internet.

Foreign culture arrives anyway, on smuggled discs and memory cards and through broadcasts picked up near the borders, and the penalties for it are severe: Human Rights Watch recorded labour sentences of seven and fifteen years in 2024 over a memory card of South Korean films. The traffic of information in the other direction is poor too. The Washington Post writer Max Fisher observed that "almost any story" about North Korea is treated as broadly credible "no matter how outlandish or thinly sourced", and several stories about the leadership have circulated abroad without a credible source.

What a meal in the north is built on

Rice and kimchi are the staples, served with side dishes, panch'an, and main courses of porridge, grilled meat or noodles. UNESCO inscribed the tradition of kimchi-making in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea on its list of intangible heritage in 2015. Its file describes hundreds of variants, knowledge passed from mothers to daughters and from mothers-in-law to daughters-in-law, and the collective preparation of large quantities for winter, known as kimjang.

The dish most tied to the capital is raengmyŏn, cold buckwheat noodles in broth, served at the Okryu-gwan restaurant in Pyongyang, which sends teams into the countryside to collect regional recipes. The sea is the main source of protein, with pollack, sardines, mackerel and herring among the catch. Meat is scarcer; most people, by one account, eat it only on public holidays such as the two leaders' birthdays.

What UNESCO lists from the north

The country's heritage is listed in two registers, one kept by the state and one by UNESCO. The state classes more than 190 sites and objects as National Treasures and some 1,800 more as Cultural Assets. UNESCO's lists hold these:

The Koguryo kingdom ruled northeast China and half the peninsula between the third century BC and the seventh century AD. Of more than 10,000 of its tombs found in China and North Korea, about 100 carry wall paintings, some 80 of them in North Korea; the inscribed property holds 63 tombs, 16 of them painted, with scenes of costume, food, houses and burial custom. The Kaesong property has 12 components from the Koryo dynasty of 918 to 1392, including five sections of the city's triple walls, an astronomical and meteorological observatory and two schools.

Arirang is a lyrical song with a refrain about crossing the Arirang hill. UNESCO's file counts thirty-six known versions, learned at home and in school and performed by professional troupes in Pyongyang.

How the calendar marks the leaders

The state's calendar is built around the ruling family. The Juche calendar, decreed on 8 July 1997, counts years from 1912, the year Kim Il Sung was born, so that 2026 is Juche 115, usually printed beside the Gregorian year. His birthday on 15 April is the Day of the Sun and his son's on 16 February the Day of the Shining Star, and the mass games have been staged around them. The full list of public holidays, with their dates for this year and next, is on the holidays page.

Sport is organised the same way, through schools and the state. Most schools practise football, basketball, table tennis, gymnastics and boxing daily. The men's football team reached the quarter-finals of the World Cup in 1966 after beating Italy, and returned to the tournament in 2010. North Korea first took part in the Olympics in 1964 and won five medals, one of them gold, at its first summer games in 1972. At London in 2012 the weightlifter Kim Un-guk set a world record in the men's 62 kg class, and successful Olympians are given apartments by the state. The Pyongyang Marathon has been open to foreign professionals since 2000 and to foreign amateurs since 2014.