Jang (Korean surname)

Jang, Chang and (less often) Zang are romanizations of the common Korean surname 장. As of the South Korean census of 2015, there were 1,021,107 people by this name in South Korea or 2.05% of the population.^[1]

In a study by the National Institute of the Korean Language based on 2007 application data for South Korean passports, it was found that 84.5% of people with this surname spelled it in Latin letters as Jang in their passports. Another 14.9% spelled it as Chang, and 0.2% as Zhang. Rare alternative spellings included Jahng and Jean.^[2]

During the 2000 South Korean Census, there were close to 920,000 people in South Korea– 2.1% of the general population–with this surname, most written with the hanja 張.^[3]

Jang is a relatively common surname in the United States and was listed 5,531st overall during the 2000 US Census, and 11th among Asian and Pacific Islanders in 2000. Zang was much less common and ranked 14,627th.^[4]

In China, the Chinese surnames Zhang (Hanja 張), Zhang (章), Zhuang (莊) and Jiang (蔣) use the same Chinese characters as the Korean surname Jang.