어느 나라 사람이에요? 국적 말하기 연습

What does “어느 나라 사람이에요?” mean in Korean?

어느 나라 사람이에요? is how you ask someone’s nationality in Korean, and it breaks down literally as “which country person are you?” — 어느 (which) + 나라 (country) + 사람 (person) + 이에요 (are). The payoff: Korean builds nationality by simply stacking a country name plus 사람, so 독일 사람 is “German” and 미국 사람 is “American.” There’s no separate adjective form to memorise.

To answer, you slot your country into the same frame: 저는 베트남 사람이에요 (“I’m Vietnamese”), 프랑스 사람이에요 (“[I’m] French”), 태국 사람이에요 (“[I’m] Thai”). The 이에요 ending is the polite “to be” that attaches straight to a noun — 예요 after a vowel, 이에요 after a consonant like the ㅁ in 사람. A common alternative is 어디에서 왔어요? (“where did you come from?”), but 어느 나라 사람이에요? asks specifically about nationality rather than where you’ve just travelled from.