Hangul: King Sejong Creates the Korean Alphabet (1443)

Hangul is the alphabet of the Korean language, created by King Sejong the Great of the Joseon dynasty in 1443 and promulgated in 1446 in a book called the Hunminjeongeum. Designed so that ordinary people could learn to read and write quickly, it is one of the few writing systems in the world whose creator, date and design principles are documented. Today it is the national script of both South and North Korea and is widely admired by linguists for its systematic design.

Background: writing Korean before Hangul

For more than a thousand years before the fifteenth century, Koreans wrote in Classical Chinese. Educated men studied the Chinese classics, sat state examinations in Chinese, and used Chinese for government records, literature and diplomacy. Korean, however, is unrelated to Chinese, with a very different grammar and sound system.

Koreans had developed ways to adapt Chinese characters to their own language. Systems known as idu and hyangchal used some characters for their meaning and others for their sound, especially to mark Korean grammatical endings. These methods were awkward and inconsistent, and they still required knowledge of hundreds or thousands of characters.

As a result, literacy was limited to a small elite, mostly members of the yangban, the scholar-official class. Farmers, artisans, most women and slaves had little access to written knowledge, laws or petitions.

The Joseon dynasty, founded in 1392, was a strongly Confucian state. Its rulers believed that a good king should educate his people in morality and law, and that idea shaped Sejong’s project.

King Sejong and the Hall of Worthies

Sejong, born in 1397, became king in 1418 and reigned until his death in 1450. He is remembered as one of Korea’s greatest rulers. He supported scholarship through the Jiphyeonjeon, or Hall of Worthies, a royal research institute of young scholars based in his palace, Gyeongbokgung in the capital Hanseong, modern Seoul.

His reign saw important work in astronomy, agriculture, medicine and music. Under Sejong, the engineer Jang Yeong-sil built water clocks and sundials, and in 1441 the court introduced standard rain gauges across the kingdom. Korea also had a strong printing tradition, already shown in the Jikji, printed with metal type in 1377, and Sejong’s court improved metal type further.

Creating the alphabet

The official chronicle of the reign, the Annals of King Sejong, records under the twelfth lunar month of 1443 that the king had personally created 28 letters, which he called the Hunminjeongeum. Because the work had been done quietly, the announcement seems to have surprised many officials.

Historians still debate how the work was shared. The annals credit Sejong himself, and his strong interest in phonology is well documented. At the same time, scholars of the Hall of Worthies, among them Jeong In-ji, Sin Suk-ju, Seong Sam-mun, Choe Hang and Pak Paeng-nyeon, worked on related projects and helped test and explain the new letters. Sin Suk-ju and Seong Sam-mun travelled several times to consult a Chinese phonologist then living in exile in Liaodong.

From 1444 the court used the new script in trial projects. In 1445 scholars completed the Yongbieocheonga, “Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven”, a cycle of poems praising the dynasty’s founders; it was printed in 1447 and is the first major work written in the new alphabet.

The Hunminjeongeum of 1446

In 1446 the king formally promulgated the script in a book titled Hunminjeongeum, “The Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People”. Its fuller edition, known as the Hunminjeongeum Haerye (“Explanations and Examples”), contains the king’s short preface, the list of letters and a long explanatory section written by scholars, with a postface by Jeong In-ji.

In the preface, Sejong explains that the speech of his country differs from that of China and cannot be properly expressed with Chinese characters. Many simple people, he writes, have things they wish to say but cannot write them down. Moved by this, he made 28 new letters so that everyone could learn them easily and use them conveniently in daily life.

Jeong In-ji’s postface adds a famous boast, often paraphrased: a clever person could learn the letters before a morning was over, and even a slow learner could master them within ten days.

The only known surviving copy of the 1446 Haerye edition was found in 1940 in Andong. Acquired by the collector Jeon Hyeong-pil, it is designated a National Treasure of South Korea and was added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 1997.

How Hangul works

Hangul is an alphabet: each letter stands for a single sound, either a consonant or a vowel. Its distinctive feature is that the shapes of the letters are based on explicit principles, set out in the Haerye.

The five basic consonants picture the speech organs used to make them. The letter for “g/k” shows the back of the tongue raised towards the throat; “n” shows the tip of the tongue touching the ridge behind the upper teeth; “m” represents the outline of the mouth; “s” depicts a tooth; and a circle represents the throat. Further consonants are formed by adding strokes to these basic shapes to show stronger or aspirated sounds, so related sounds have related shapes. Linguists such as Geoffrey Sampson have therefore described Hangul as a “featural” script.

The vowels are built from three elements drawn from Neo-Confucian cosmology: a dot for heaven, a horizontal line for earth and a vertical line for humankind. Combining these produced the vowel letters.

Letters are not written in a single line, as in European alphabets. Instead, they are grouped into square syllable blocks, each containing an initial consonant, a vowel and sometimes a final consonant. This allowed Hangul to sit alongside Chinese characters on the same page, each block occupying the space of one character.

Opposition and slow acceptance

The new script met resistance. In 1444 Choe Manri, a senior scholar of the Hall of Worthies, submitted a petition with other scholars against it. They argued that only peoples outside Chinese civilisation, such as the Mongols, Jurchens, Japanese and Tibetans, had their own scripts, and that abandoning Chinese characters would harm learning and relations with Ming China. Sejong rejected their arguments.

After Sejong’s death, Classical Chinese remained the language of government, examinations and high culture for more than four centuries. Hangul was often called eonmun, “vernacular script”, a somewhat dismissive name. In 1504 the tyrannical King Yeonsangun banned its teaching and use after anonymous posters written in the alphabet criticised him, though the ban did not last beyond his reign.

Even so, Hangul spread steadily. It was used for Buddhist texts, Confucian primers, translations, letters and, increasingly, popular fiction and poetry. It was especially important among women, including women of the royal family and aristocracy, many of whom wrote letters, diaries and memoirs in it.

From vernacular script to national alphabet

In the late nineteenth century, reformers promoted Hangul as a symbol of Korean identity and modern education. In 1894, during the Gabo Reform, King Gojong ordered that official documents be based on the Korean script. The first Korean newspaper printed entirely in Hangul, the Dongnip Sinmun (The Independent), appeared in 1896.

The linguist Ju Si-gyeong gave the alphabet its modern name around 1912; “Hangul” is usually explained as meaning “great script” or “Korean script”. Under Japanese rule from 1910 to 1945, Korean-language education was gradually restricted, and Hangul became closely tied to national resistance. After liberation in 1945, both Koreas made Hangul their main script. North Korea abolished Chinese characters in ordinary writing, while South Korea now uses them only occasionally.

Myths and facts

A common claim is that Sejong invented Hangul entirely alone and overnight. The records credit the king, but the alphabet was the result of years of phonological study, and court scholars took part in refining and explaining it.

Another claim is that Hangul was invented without any outside model. Most scholars see it as an original creation, but some, notably Gari Ledyard, argue that the shapes of a few basic consonants may have been influenced by the ‘Phags-pa script of the Mongol Yuan dynasty, which the Joseon court knew. The question remains debated.

It is also sometimes said that Hangul was immediately adopted by all Koreans. In fact Classical Chinese dominated official and scholarly writing until the late nineteenth century.

Timeline

• 1397: Sejong is born.
• 1418: Sejong becomes king of Joseon.
• 1420: The Hall of Worthies is reorganised as a royal research institute.
• 1443, twelfth lunar month: The annals record the king’s creation of 28 letters.
• 1444: Choe Manri and other scholars petition against the new script.
• 1446: The Hunminjeongeum is promulgated.
• 1447: Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven is printed in the new alphabet.
• 1504: King Yeonsangun bans the teaching of Hangul.
• 1894: The Gabo Reform makes the Korean script the basis of official documents.
• 1940: A copy of the Hunminjeongeum Haerye is discovered in Andong.

Why it matters

Hangul is a rare example of a writing system deliberately designed by a ruler for the benefit of his whole people, with its principles explained in a surviving book. It eventually made mass literacy possible in Korea and became a central part of Korean national identity. It also shows how a script tailored to a language’s sounds can be learned quickly, a point linguists and educators still cite today.