I’ve checked the names guidelines and I haven’t found anything related to Korean names.
Let’s use 박은빈 as an example.
- 박 — family name (Korean culture is family name first)
- No issue here. Just included for completeness.
- 은빈 — given name (often two syllables, sometimes three, rarely one).
- It can be written as:
- Eunbin. The combined format. Common.
- EunBin. Combined, but the two syllables are capitalised. Not that common, but there are.
- Eun-bin. Hyphenated AMA style format. Also common.
- Eun-Bin. Hyphenated MLA style. Common too.
- Eun Bin. Yet another common format.
- It can be written as:
The Revised Romanization of Hangul, the official guide of the Korean government, did not give anything specific regarding this.
The only information we can use are:
- Combined = this format is recently increasing as the preferred by talent agencies / labels (both in music and drama/movies). But not necessarily the artists per se.
- Combined but syllables are capitalised = example: Kim SeJeong. Her agency once used Kim Se-Jeong for years, a year or two ago, they dropped the hyphen to form “Kim SeJeong”.
- Hyphenated AMA style = this format can still be seen for non-artists; and generally preferred to give a hint to a non-Korean how to pronounce their name. This is the format used by Wikipedia.
- Hyphenated MLA style = both names are capitalised. It also makes it easier to see, and those are names.
- Two separate “words” = avoided if possible because the 2nd syllable is sometimes mistaken as a “middle name”.
In Musicbrainz, all 4 styles above are used for Korean names. Some were probably how the artist or their label prefers it, but there’s too many for it to be a “preferred” name for all the entries.
And then, what to do for those artists who kept on switching between different formats of their name? It’s not frequent but still…
Apologies, I have a lot of questions regarding names. I just want to get it right the first time to avoid going through everything again to conform to a standard.
