Hyangchal

Hyangchal, meaning “local script,” was an early Korean system for writing the Korean language by using Chinese characters (hanja). It emerged in the Silla kingdom and was used roughly from the 5th to the 9th centuries to render Korean texts before Hangul was created.

Hyangchal employed hanja for both their meanings and their sounds to represent native Korean morphemes and affixes. Unlike later systems that standardized readings, the assignment of hanja in hyangchal varied by scribal tradition and context. A single character could stand for different Korean words or grammatical elements depending on how it was used in a text. This flexibility allowed writers to capture Korean syntax and vocabulary within a logographic framework, but also makes precise interpretation difficult today.

The surviving material includes a corpus of Hyangga, native Korean poems from the Silla period, written in hyangchal, as well as inscriptions and other documents. These texts provide important though fragmentary evidence of early Korean language and literature. Hyangchal is a predecessor to later writing systems such as idu and gugyeol, which sought more standardized ways to render Korean with Chinese characters, and it preceded the development of Hangul in the 15th century. Because the exact mappings between hanja and Korean morphemes were not standardized, hyangchal readings remain a topic of linguistic and philological research.