Origin of Hangul

The native Korean alphabet, called Hangul (한글) in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl (조선글) in North Korea, is a writing system for the Korean language. It was mostly completed around late 1443 to early 1444 and officially published in 1446. It was invented to serve a number of purposes, especially to aid general literacy in Korea.

Before Hangul's invention, Korea had been using Hanja (Chinese characters) and variants of it to write Korean. However, the script was poorly suited for transcribing Korean, and its difficulty contributed to high illiteracy amongst commoners.

King Sejong the Great (r. 1418–1450) was responsible for Hangul's creation. Most scholars believe Sejong was significantly personally involved in creating the script and worked on the script alongside one or more others. A minority of scholars believe that he was the sole creator of it. The script was possibly largely designed in secret, possibly in anticipation of the backlash that the script eventually received, although this is debated.

According to the Hunminjeongeum Haerye, one of the two texts written to introduce Hangul, the shapes of Hangul letters (called jamo) are designed to reflect the shapes of speech organs and concepts in Chinese philosophy. Hangul also received inspiration from Chinese linguistic theory of the time, although these theories were innovated upon and adapted to suit Korean phonology. Some scholars believe that Hangul received minor inspiration from the Tibetan-Mongolian script ʼPhags-pa, although that hypothesis still argues that Hangul was largely original.