When someone in Korea says ‘머리’ (meaning ‘head’) they are guided into forming their lips in the shape of ㅁ, the first character in the syllable. In this way the Korean language, Hangul, is remarkable in containing micro-instructions to the speaker (or phonological encoding) within the characters themselves. Hangul is one of the most phonologically encoded languages in existence, but it is also one of most recent.
How Hangul was Created
Before 1443 C.E., although Korean was spoken by its people in the Korean Peninsula, the language did not have its own alphabet. This meant that, due to centuries of Chinese rule and cultural influence, Chinese characters (called Hanja in the Korean context) were frequently used to transcribe spoken Korean. To read and write the thousands of Hanja characters required costly education, which effectively excluded the common people, and meant that literacy in Korea was limited to intellectuals and society’s elites.
To combat widespread illiteracy, King Sejong (1397–1450), whose epithet is “the Great,” instigated a language reform, which led to the creation of Hangul in 1443. Born in 1397, Sejong succeeded to the throne at the age of 22 when his father, King Taejong, abdicated in his favor. Chosen in place of his oldest brother, the rightful heir to the throne whose lifestyle and conduct were deemed unfit for a king, Sejong became the fourth monarch of the Joseon Kingdom. His reign, which lasted until 1450, was a period of great cultural and intellectual accomplishment in Korea.
King Sejong governed according to the principles of Confucianism. These principles included the idea that justice and righteousness should characterize the relations between a sovereign and their subjects. King Sejong believed that the basis of a good government was a ruler with broad-ranging knowledge, virtue, and the ability to recognize and utilize men of talent for government service.
A noted Confucian scholar himself, King Sejong placed great emphasis on scholarship and education. He promoted research in the cultural, economic, and political heritage of Korea, and sponsored many new developments in the areas of science, philosophy, music, and linguistics. To encourage young scholars to devote their time to study, he established grants and other forms of government support. For example, he established a national academy called Jiphyeonjeon, which means “Hall of Wise Men,” where he invited scholars from across Korea to study. Together they wrote books on various subjects, including music, medicine, poetry, and meteorology.
The most outstanding of his achievements by far was the creation of the Korean alphabet, or Hangul. Until the invention of Hangul, the people of Joseon used clumsy and cumbersome systems using some Chinese characters for their pronunciation and others for their meaning to represent the vernacular language. But Chinese, a language very different from Korean in its vocal patterns and sentence formation, could not adequately represent Korean sounds and structure. Besides, the complexity of Chinese characters made the writing system too difficult for those other than the privileged few to learn and master.
During his reign, King Sejong always deplored the fact that the common people, ignorant of the complicated Chinese characters that were being used by the educated, were not able to read and write. He understood their frustration and wanted to provide Koreans with a written means of expression other than the complicated Chinese system. With this objective in mind, he commissioned a group of scholars to devise a phonetic writing system that could correctly represent the sounds of spoken Korean and be easily learned by all people. The system, Hangul, was completed in 1443.
The Fight for Independence
Although Sejong the Great created Hangul in the 15th century, Chinese characters, otherwise known as Hanja, were still prominently seen as the legitimate form of writing. However, as the characters were not created for the use of the Korean language, there remained inconsistencies and problems within the Hanja system. Ju Si-Gyeong, one of the founders of modern Korean linguistics, took note of this during his studies. At the time, the Hanja system was the method to read the Chinese translation and Chinese original text as they were and later, after memorizing each and every character, add Korean endings to unravel the meaning.
Ju observed that only after the last step with Korean words would people know what it meant, and recognized just how different Hanja and Korean really were. He decided that Korea needed to realize the importance of their own language and delved into the study of the Korean language to further his ambitions. He enrolled in Pai Chai University in 1894 where he began his research on the Korean language. Ju was also a part of the Independence Newspaper, along with Seo Jae-pil. It became the first newspaper that was published in pure Korean, working towards accessibility.
Ju was also a part of the Independence Association and was employed as a Korean teacher by Ehwa School founder Mary Scranton and by Sangdong Youth Hakwon. Amid the whirlwind of responsibilities, he managed to graduate from Pai Chai University with an intense passion for study. He went on to teach at countless schools and was known for his tight class schedules and constant hurried appearance.
In 1897, he established the Korean Language Structure Society and later the Korean Language Society in 1908. He made the first endeavor to make grammar terminology and technical terminology into native words and became the first person to organize language phoneme research and language grammar. As Japanese efforts to curtail the language became apparent after the annexation of Korea in 1910, he worked on bringing awareness to the importance of learning Korean as a member of the Korean Language Society
From 1907 to 1914, Ju published six books on the Korean language including his most notable “Sounds of the Language” which he published in 1914. The book advocated for Hangul to be written linearly, although this has never been adopted. The term “Hangul,” made by “han” (meaning “great”) and “geul” (meaning “script”), was also coined by Ju in 1912. Before this, it was referred to as “Eonmun,” meaning “vernacular script.”
Unfortunately, Ju passed at the young age of 38 in 1914 from acute indigestion. He was later recognized for his efforts and accomplishments thanks to one of his previous students, Jang Ji-young, who worked to get Ju’s memoir published in textbooks. Ju was awarded the Order of Merit for the National Foundation Presidential Medal in 1980 and Pai Chai University erected the Ju Si-gyeong Memorial Building in his honor. His efforts also live on through the Korean Language Society which is still active today and his memory is engrained in the language itself. Ju is well known not only for his achievements in language but also in his belief that “When the language rises, the country rises, and when the language falls, so does the country,” thus recognizing its importance in resisting foreign oppression.
Science behind Hangul
“The Korean Alphabet is the Most Scientific in the World.”
One is prone to dismiss statements as a nationalistic hyperbole. However, it would be wrong to dismiss the claim, as any linguists would agree. What makes the Korean alphabet “scientific” is how its letters correspond to the places of articulation in the mouth.
Consider the letters “ㄱ” and “ㄴ” as examples. These two letters roughly correspond to the /k/ and /n/ phonemes of the International Phonetic Alphabet. “ㄱ” shows the back of the tongue raised to make contact with the soft palate, in the rear part of the roof of the mouth, where /k/ is produced. “ㄴ” shows the tongue raised to the front of the month, where the /n/ sound originates.
This same mimicking of the shape the mouth takes when forming their sounds is true of all 14 Korean consonants. Its ten vowels represent the three concepts of Yin (Earth) and Yang (Heaven), with Man at the intersection of the two. The consonants and vowels are then combined to form syllable blocks that are easy to recognize and, with practice, to pronounce. In 1446, the new alphabet was promulgated in an enlightened document titled “The Proper Sounds for the Instruction of the People,” also called the “Hunminjeongeum.” Hangul is seen as a humanistic creation of the Korean Renaissance.
Its Significance Today
Today, Korean is the native language of more than 77 million people. Hangul is celebrated by Koreans worldwide, with the annual commemorative ‘Hangeul Day’ on October 9th in South Korea, and ‘Chosongul Day’ on January 15th in North Korea. Chinese is still found in South Korean newspapers and scholarly journals alongside Hangul, but its use is increasingly considered elitist by South Koreans. In North Korea, Hangul has completely replaced Chinese.
From its inception as a tool to empower the common people to its role in preserving Korean identity under colonial rule, Hangul stands not only as a linguistic system but as a symbol of resilience, innovation, and cultural pride. Hangul is more than just a script; it is a living legacy, written into the hearts, voices, and histories of the Korean people.
Hangul is more than just a script; it is a living legacy, written into the hearts, voices, and histories of the Korean people.