Korean mixed script

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Korean mixed script 한국어의 국한문혼용(韓國語의 國漢文混用)
Type	Alternative – utilizes both logographic (hanja) and alphabetic (Hangul) characters
Spoken languages	Korean language
Time period	1443 to the present
ISO 15924	Kore
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Korean mixed script
Hangul 한자 혼용 or 국한문 혼용 Hanja 漢字混用 or 國漢文混用 Revised Romanization Hanja honyong / Gukhanmun honyong McCune-Reischauer Hancha honyong / Kukhanmun honyong

Korean mixed script is a form of writing that uses both Hangul (an alphabetical script) and hanja (Chinese characters).

The script has never been used for languages other than Korean. In North Korea, writing in mixed script has been replaced by writing only in Hangul in the middle of the 20th century; mixed script has not been used in the second half of the 20th century. In South Korea, the use of mixed script has slowly declined.

The script uses hanja to write Sino-Korean vocabulary, but never to write native Korean vocabulary. This distinguishes Korean mixed script (and hanja in general) from modern Japanese writing, whose kanji may be used not only to write Sino-Japanese, but also native Japanese vocabulary.

From the 15th to the 20th century, the Korean mixed script usually used hanja whenever possible (that is, for all Sino-Korean words), and Hangul to write only grammatical suffixes and native Korean words. Using Hangul to write Sino-Korean words only became common in the 20th century. Whereas early texts may look similar to Literary Chinese as they consisted only of Sino-Korean vocabulary, interspersed with few auxiliary verbs and word endings (written in Hangul) to ease understanding the sentences' structure, modern texts – whether containing a significant amount of native Korean vocabulary or not – usually use hanja for less than 100% of their Sino-Korean vocabulary. Today, this development has reached the point where most Korean texts are written in a form that can no longer be called mixed script, as hanja are either not used at all, or used very sparsely to disambiguate or to show the meaning of rare or newly coined words. Hanja still occur in many newspapers' headlines, where they serve to both disambiguate and abbreviate (for example, 日 il for 日本 ilbon “Japan”), and to a lesser degree in some newspapers' texts, but not in magazines. They can also sometimes be found in academic literature. Mixed script making use of hanja wherever possible is still used for judicial texts such as the constitution (see example below).

While hanja may still be seen in 21th century Korean texts, their usage has changed. Perhaps owing to a decline in hanja literacy, it has become common to provide both a term's hanja and Hangul at that term's first occurrence in a text – instead of writing it only in hanja as is done in traditional mixed script.

[edit] History

See also: Hanja

Up to the 1970s, many books and newspapers were written in mixed Hangul and hanja characters. Since then, however, the overwhelming majority of print publications are written in Hangul only. Today, only a few people write in the mixed script.

[edit] Example

Below text is preamble in constitution of the Republic of Korea. The first text is written in Hangul, the other one is shown in its mixed script version.

[edit] See also

• Hanja
• Sino-Korean vocabulary