The Secret History of Hangul, The Korean Alphabet

A Kingdom in Borrowed Words

Before the 15th century, Koreans had a spoken language but no native writing system. To write, they relied on Classical Chinese characters, known in Korea as Hanja. While a testament to the deep cultural exchange in East Asia, Hanja was a terrible fit for the Korean language.

The two languages have fundamentally different grammatical structures. Chinese is an isolating language, while Korean is agglutinative, meaning it relies heavily on particles and endings attached to words to denote their function. Forcing Korean into the Hanja system was like trying to write English using only Egyptian hieroglyphs—clunky, inefficient, and incredibly difficult.

Mastering Hanja required memorizing thousands of complex characters, a luxury only affordable to the aristocratic male elite (the yangban). For farmers, merchants, and women, literacy was an impossible dream. This created a staggering social divide. A commoner couldn’t read the laws that governed their life or submit a written plea for justice. King Sejong the Great, the fourth ruler of the Joseon Dynasty, saw this as an unacceptable injustice.

The Vision of a Benevolent King

King Sejong (r. 1418-1450) was a true renaissance monarch—a brilliant scholar, a skilled military strategist, and a deeply compassionate humanist. He was troubled by the literacy gap, believing it hindered not only justice but the nation’s potential. In the preface to the document unveiling the new alphabet, he wrote:

“The sounds of our country’s language are different from those of China and do not fit the letters. Thus, many of the ignorant, wishing to express themselves, have been unable to convey their feelings. Taking pity on this, I have newly created 28 letters. It is my wish that all the people may easily learn these letters and that they be convenient for daily use.”

His goal was radical: to create a writing system so simple and logical that anyone, regardless of status or education, could learn it in a matter of hours. To achieve this, he gathered a team of scholars in the “Hall of Worthies” (Jiphyeonjeon) and, largely in secret, began one of the most remarkable projects in the history of linguistics.

The Genius of Hangul’s Design

The result of their work, proclaimed in 1446 as the Hunminjeongeum (“The Proper Sounds for the Instruction of the People”), was nothing short of revolutionary. Unlike writing systems that evolved organically over millennia, Hangul was deliberately engineered with scientific principles and philosophical depth.

The Consonants: A Picture of Your Mouth

The most breathtaking feature of Hangul is that the shapes of its consonants are not arbitrary. They are pictures of the human speech organs as they produce that sound. This is known as featural design.

• ㄱ (g/k): This represents the shape of the back of the tongue raised to touch the soft palate. Try making a ‘g’ sound; you can feel this position.
• ㄴ (n): This represents the shape of the tip of the tongue touching the back of the upper teeth or alveolar ridge.
• ㅁ (m): This character outlines the shape of the closed lips.
• ㅅ (s): This represents the shape of the incisors. The friction of air passing over them creates the ‘s’ sound.
• ㅇ (ng/silent): This represents the open, circular shape of the throat.

Even more ingeniously, other consonants are derived from these five basic shapes by adding strokes to represent a phonetic feature like aspiration (a puff of air). For example, a stroke is added to ㄱ (g) to create ㅋ (k), and to ㄷ (d, derived from ㄴ) to create ㅌ (t).

The Vowels: Heaven, Earth, and Humanity

The vowels were designed based on a philosophical concept of three essential elements:

• ㆍ (a dot, now merged with other vowels): Represented Heaven, a celestial circle.
• ㅡ (eu): A flat, horizontal line representing the Earth.

* ㅣ (i): A vertical line representing a standing Human, who connects Heaven and Earth.

All other vowels in the Hangul system are created by combining these three core symbols. For instance, combining ㅣ and ㆍ creates ㅏ(a) and ㅓ(eo). This elegant system allowed a vast array of vowel sounds to be represented with just a few simple strokes.

The Syllable Blocks: LEGOs of Language

Instead of being written in a straight line like English letters, Hangul characters are grouped into syllable blocks. Each block contains at least one consonant and one vowel, arranged to fit into a square space, much like a Chinese character. For example, the word Hangul is written as 한글, not ㅎㅏㄴㄱㅡㄹ. This is a brilliant marriage of Hangul’s phonetic precision with the block-like aesthetic of Hanja, which it was designed to replace.

The “Secret History”: Elite Resistance and Suppression

You might think such a brilliant, populist invention would be celebrated. You would be wrong. The project was kept secret for a reason: King Sejong knew his own scholar-officials would fiercely oppose it.

Their backlash was immediate and venomous. They argued that abandoning Hanja was an act of cultural barbarism, an insult to the “superior” civilization of Ming China. But their real fear was the loss of power. Their elite status was built on their exclusive mastery of Hanja and the Confucian classics. A simple alphabet that anyone could learn threatened to dismantle this pillar of their privilege.

They derisively nicknamed the new script Eonmun—”vulgar script” or “vernacular writing”—fit only for women and commoners. For centuries, their campaign was successful. Hangul was suppressed, and official government documents and scholarly works continued to be written in Hanja. The alphabet went underground, preserved in folk novels, poems, and letters written by those outside the halls of power.

From “Vulgar Script” to National Treasure

Hangul’s revival came centuries later, fueled by the fires of nationalism. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as Korea faced increasing threats from Japan, Hangul was rediscovered as a powerful symbol of Korean uniqueness and identity. Scholars like Ju Si-gyeong championed the script, coining the modern name “Hangul” (한글), meaning “Great Script” or “Korean Script.”

During the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945), when the Korean language itself was suppressed, Hangul became a tool of resistance. After liberation, it was enthusiastically embraced and became the official writing system of both North and South Korea, leading to one of the highest literacy rates in the world.

Today, Hangul is a source of immense national pride. South Korea celebrates Hangul Day on October 9th as a national holiday. What was once dismissed as a “vulgar script” is now celebrated as one of history’s greatest linguistic achievements—a testament to one king’s radical empathy and the enduring power of a language for the people.