The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has announced three major projects that will promote the Korean language globally.

Under the projects, the ministry plans to build next year 30 more Korean language schools in Europe and the Americas where Korean pop culture is very popular.

The move will increase the number of overseas Korean language schools to 90 next year and to 120 by 2013.

In addition, the ministry intends to dispatch 20 Korean language teachers with proper certificates to 20 countries and to increase the number of applicants for the Korean language teachers program to 200 in 2012 from the current 55.

So far, some 15-thousand people around the world have learned Korean from about 230 teachers at the schools abroad.