K-pop, k-dramas, facial care, and series like The Squid Game have put Korea on everyone’s lips. The interest in the pop culture of this country has made Korean one of the languages with fastest growing in the world, but beyond pop culture, did you know that Korean and the history of its alphabet are closely linked to women? Duolingo explores the historical and cultural importance of this language for the anniversary.
Korean is a particular language because it has a different syntactic structure, which consists of subject-object-verb and its writing is with different characters from the ones we use. This alphabet is called hangul and was created during the Joseon dynasty, when King Sejong decided that Korea deserved a native alphabet, since until then only Chinese characters were used to write Korean.
a new alphabet
Sejong’s motivation for creating a new alphabet was that the use of Chinese characters, called hanja, kept most Koreans illiterate, as Chinese was not only too complicated for ordinary people, but also not widely understood. He taught the women. Thus, for a long time, classical Korean literature was written in Chinese and was the territory of the yangban (Korean nobility).
By having a higher hierarchy for being men, the yangban could have more say and vote in all aspects. Korean women were essentially prohibited from being authors. On the other hand, at present, they are translated, recognized and awarded. cho nam jooHa Seong-nan, Jimin Han, Yun Ko-eun and Han Kang are some of the Korean authors who publish on topics such as sexism and the experience of living in a society still dominated by men thanks to the appropriation of hangul seven centuries ago.
The reason? The upper social classes, that is, those who knew how to write in Chinese, disdained it and did not adopt it until after 1945, although the hangul was decreed in 1446. The new characters were created in a simple way, starting from the position of the speech organs used to pronounce and formed by syllables of two and three letters to make them easy to learn. Those who appropriated hangul were people with fewer economic resources but, above all, women.
Hangul and women’s writing
Hangul became known as the “language of the inner rooms” or as the language of the domain of women, who finally had a verbatim voice alongside all those who had never before been able to write down their thoughts. Thanks to this, women had a window in writing due to education and were able to express issues such as free love more openly, specifically the sense of being able to choose the spouse they wanted and not one that was imposed.
The creation of hangul made writing possible for women, along with other elements that converged to bring them to the forefront of Korean literature in translation (into English, French, Polish, Spanish, among others), such as post-World War II modernization of Korea. World War, which brought with it the idea of equality; industrialization and the new class of autonomous “economic woman”. Park Wansuh was perhaps the first author to become popular and open the door to new fiction created by women.
At the moment, Korean is among the 7 most learned languages on Duolingo, and perhaps in the next few years, one of the reasons to learn it is also to read great authors like Park Wanshu, Eun Hee-kyung, Ch’oe Yun, Shin Kyung-Sook, Bae Suah, or the ones mentioned above, among others, in their original language.
Featured words
Finally, we highlight some of the most common words in Hangul, both in writing and pronunciation, are:
- 안녕하세요 (annyeong haseyo) – “hello”
- 안녕히 가세요 (annyeonghi gaseyo) or 안녕히 계세요 (annyeonghi gyeseyo) – “goodbye”
- 네 (ne) or 예 (ye) – “yes”
- 아니요 (aniyo) – “not”
- 주세요 (juseyo) – “please”
- 감사합니다 (gamsahamnida) or 고마워요 (gomawoyo) – “thank you”
- 미안해요 (mianhaeyo) – “I’m sorry”
- 대박 (daebak) – “great, amazing”
- 짱 (jjang) – “the best”
- 꿀잼 (kkuljaem) – “funny or interesting”
If you are looking to learn Korean this year, the duolingo app, both on Android and iOS, will be your best ally. You can also find more fascinating facts about languages, their origins and functions in the duolingo blog. Remember that by dedicating a little of your time each day, you will be able to master this language and many more.