Korean: A Language Isolate Written in Hangul

Korean is generally treated by linguists as a language isolate or the sole surviving member of its own small family, with proposed but unproven wider connections to Japanese and to the Altaic hypothesis remaining scholarly minority positions rather than consensus, and the language is written today in Hangul, a featural alphabet deliberately designed and promulgated in 1443 under King Sejong the Great specifically to give ordinary Koreans, previously reliant on borrowed Chinese characters poorly suited to Korean grammar, an accessible native script, making Hangul one of the few writing systems in the world with a documented single inventor and an explicit founding purpose of expanding literacy. Korean absorbed substantial Chinese vocabulary over centuries of cultural and administrative contact, comparable to Latin and Greek's influence on English, and Japanese colonial rule from 1910 to 1945 suppressed Korean language use in schools and public life, a policy Korean nationalist and religious institutions, including Christian churches, actively resisted by continuing to teach and use Korean.

North and South Korea have diverged somewhat in vocabulary and orthographic convention since national division in 1945, though both retain Hangul as their writing system, and North Korea's state ideology has itself been described by outside scholars as functioning with quasi-religious structure and vocabulary despite the government's official atheism.