Industrialization of the country has made life more hectic and complicated. Young married couples have begun to separate from their extended families and start their own homes. Now almost all families are couple-centered nuclear families.

Korean Names
A Korean name consists of a family name followed by a given name, as used by the Korean people in both North Korea and South Korea. In the Korean language, 'ireum' usually refers to the family name (seong) and given name (myeong) together. A long history of the use of family names has caused surname extinction. There are only about 250 Korean family names currently in use, and the three most common (Kim, Lee, and Park) account for nearly half of the population.
The family name is typically a single syllable, and the given name two syllables. There is no middle name in the Western sense. Many Koreans have their given names made of a generational name syllable and an individually distinct syllable, while this practice is declining in the younger generations. The generational name syllable is shared by siblings in North Korea, and by all members of the same generation of an extended family in South Korea. Married men and women usually keep their full personal names, and children inherit the father's family name.
Modern family names are subdivided into bon-gwan (clans), i.e. extended families which originate in the lineage system used in previous historical periods. Each clan is identified by a specific place, and traces its origin to a common patrilineal ancestor.
Early names based on the Korean language were recorded in the Three Kingdoms period (57 BCE 668 CE), but with the growing adoption of Chinese writing system, these were gradually replaced by names based on Chinese characters. During periods of Mongol and Manchu influence, the ruling class supplemented their Korean names with Mongol and Manchu names. In addition, during the later period of Japanese rule in the early 20th century, Koreans were forced to adopt Japanized names. In recent decades, there has been a trend towards using native Korean words as names, although still a small minority.
Despite the standard romanization of Korean, modern Koreans, when using European languages, romanize their names in various ways, most often approximating the pronunciation in English orthography. Some keep the original order of names, while others reverse the names to match the usual Western pattern

History
The use of names has evolved over time, from the first recording of Korean names in the early Three Kingdoms period through the gradual adoption of Chinese forms of naming as centralized kingdoms came to dominate Korean life. A complex system, including courtesy names and pen names as well as posthumous names and childhood names, arose out of Confucian tradition. The courtesy name system in particular arose from the Classic of Rites, a core text of the Confucian canon.

Native Names
During the Three Kingdoms period, native given names were sometimes composed of three syllables like Misaheun (미사흔) and Sadaham (사다함), which were later transcribed into hanja (未斯欣, 斯多含). The use of family names was limited to kings in the beginning, but gradually spread to aristocrats and eventually to most of the population.
Some recorded family names are apparently native Korean words, such as toponyms. At that time, some characters of Korean names might have been read not by their Sino-Korean pronunciation but by their native reading (see hanja). For example, Yeon Gaesomun (연개소문; 淵蓋蘇文), the name of Goguryeo's first Grand Prime Minister, was transcribed (probably modified into japanized form) into "Iri kasumi" (伊梨柯須) in the Nihonshoki. Early Silla names are also believed to represent Old Korean vocabulary; for example, Bak Hyeokgeose, the name of the founder of Silla, was pronounced something like "Bulgeonuri" (弗矩內), which can be translated as "bright world."