HANGUL

Hangul is the Korean alphabet used to write the Korean language. It was developed in the 15th century during the Joseon Dynasty under King Sejong the Great and scholars of the Hall of Worthies. The script was formally promulgated in 1446 in a document called Hunminjeongeum, which explained its design and purpose. Hangul is a featural alphabet: the shapes of the consonants reflect the places and manners of articulation, while vowels are formed from combinations of bars and dots that symbolize aspects of the phonation. Syllables are written in blocks that typically contain an initial consonant, a vowel, and an optional final consonant.

Consonants and vowels are written together as syllabic units. The system was designed to be easy to learn and to provide a low literacy barrier for commoners, in contrast to the more complex Chinese characters that were historically used to write Korean. Over time Hangul supplanted Hanja for most everyday use, though Hanja still appears in certain contexts in South Korea and is less used in the North.

Today Hangul is the official writing system of both South Korea and North Korea. It is used in education, media, and digital communication, and is encoded in Unicode in the Hangul Syllables block (U+AC00–U+D7A3) as well as separate Jamo blocks. Hangul’s clarity and adaptability have contributed to Korea’s high literacy rates and to the global study of Korean language and culture.