What is the history of the Korean Language?

Beginning in the 5th century AD, the Korean language was originally written in hanja, borrowed Chinese characters that were spoken with a unique Korean pronunciation. This continued until 1443 when King Sejong the Great commissioned a group of scholars to help him devise a Korean language alphabet that all of the Korean people could use. Some linguists classify Korean as having developed from the Altaic language family, which is generally thought to include languages such as Japanese, Mongolian, and Turkish. Others consider it to be a language isolate, meaning it has no evident genealogical relationship to any other languages. Due to a lack of concrete knowledge about the language’s origins, there is no one theory that is totally accepted, and the genealogical classification of the Korean language remains a point of contention to this day. Hangeul became much more widely used, often mixed in with the heavier use of hanja. Novels completely are written in Hangeul script started to appear as well. By this time even official documents started to mix hanja and Hangeul. The use of Hangeul was mostly limited to topic markers, conjunctions, and others, while most of the main words were still written in hanja.

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