As well as being one of the world’s oldest living language spoken today, Korean is also renowned for its obscurity and the many misunderstandings and misconceptions that surround it.
Just like the origins of the Korean people themselves, the origins of the Korean language are just as obscure. 19th century Western scholars have put forward many theories that have made connections to Korean being an Ural-Altaic language, which includes a diverse offering of languages such as Turkish, Mongolian, Hungarian and Finnish.
Although it is clear that Chinese has greatly influenced the Korean language, it is linguistically unrelated, belonging to a completely different language family. Japanese, while appearing somewhat similar, also remains distinct from Korean.
Korean is a language isolate, meaning it doesn't have links to any other language on Earth.
Many believe that the Korean language originated from a single cultural source. However, just as the Korean people do not come from one sole homogenous race, the Korean language as we know it today has not evolved from one single source or language either.
One of the most obvious differences between Korean today and Korean in the past is its writing system, known as Hangul.
In the years before the introduction of Hangul, the alphabet used was Hanja, which was mainly made up of traditional Chinese letters. However, it also included an amalgamation of other writing systems that had developed over the years. The mixing of these systems made the language extremely complicated to learn, resulting in dwindling literacy rates in the country.
It was only those who were able to access a high level of education, such as nobles or scholars, that were able to achieve a decent level of basic literacy, resulting in the country having an extremely high illiteracy rate.
King Sejong, who is recognised as being amongst some of the most influential Koreans in the history of the country, is best known for personally inventing Hangul. He lived from 1397 to 1450 and ruled as the 4th king of the Joseon Dynasty, beginning his reign in 1418 up until his death. The Hangul script was completed in 1443 and published three years later, just four years before his death.
King Sejong is one of only two Korean kings called "great".
The main motive behind the creation of Hangul was to make an alphabet that could be learnt by anyone, regardless of their educational background or social standing. As a result, Korea saw an almost immediate increase in their literacy rates after its introduction.
Hangul was originally called Hunmin chongum, meaning ‘Correct/Proper Sounds for the Instruction of the People’.
However, Hangul, which translates as ‘Korean writing’, didn’t instantly become the prominent writing system of the Korean language. A patriotic wave swept through Korea in the 1800s, which saw Hunmin chongum, renamed as kungmun or “national script”, and this became the version most readily taught in Roman Catholic and Presbyterian mission schools.
During the Japanese occupation of Korea in the early 1900s, using kungmun was made illegal as part of the aim to cancel Korean culture. This resulted in increased curiosity in kungmun and led to more work being done to conserve it, which eventually resulted in the use of Hangul.
Hangul soon became a way of fighting back against the Japanese attempts at erasing their culture and became a regular occurrence in everyday life. At the end of the Second World War, Hangul became the preferred writing system, with Hanja used almost solely amongst academics.
In North Korea there is a complete rejection of the Hanja writing script as it is viewed as a type of cultural imperialism.
For almost 600 years, Hangul has remained untouched by illegible dialects and, as a result, Koreans are amongst some of the most literate people on the planet with a literacy rate of 98%. Although the advantages of preserving some aspects of Hanja are still recognised, particularly in modern written Korean which is a combination of the two writing systems, most Korean’s knowledge of the script is limited to just 1,800 characters out of the over 50,000 present in Korean Hanja dictionaries.
Originally Hangul was a 28 letter alphabet, however, four of these letters (three consonants and one vowel) have since been dropped. With the main purpose of developing Hangul to be simple to learn for anyone, it has been coined by some as one of the easiest languages to learn and can easily be learnt in just a few hours.
Today, Hangul remains the only alphabet to be celebrated with its own national holiday. On October 9th it is globally recognised for its inventiveness and originality. In 1989, UNESCO even established the ‘King Sejong literacy prize’, acknowledging governments around the world who have worked hard in contributing to the fight against illiteracy.
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