Hangul

Hangul (??) is the native alphabet used to write the Korean language, as opposed to the Hanja system borrowed from China. For other Romanized spellings of "Hangul", please see Names below.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

While Hangul may appear logographic to the uninitiated, it is actually phonemic. Each Hangul syllabic block consists of at least two of the 24 alphabetic letters (jamo): 14 consonants and 10 vowels. Historically, the alphabet had several more consonants and vowels. (See Obsolete Jamo.) For a phonological description of the letters, see Phonology.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Alphabet: An alphabet is a complete standardized set of letters — basic written symbols — each of which roughly represents a phoneme of a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it may have been in the past. There are other systems of writing such as logograms, in which each symbol represe...

Korean language: The Korean language (??? / ???) is the most widely used language in Korea, and is the official language of both North and South Korea. The language is also spoken widely in neighbouring Yanbian, China. Worldwide, there are around 78 million Korean speakers, including large groups in the former Sovi...

Hanja: Hanja (lit. Han character(s)), or Hanmun (한문; 漢文), sometimes translated as Sino-Korean characters, are what Chinese characters (Hanzi) are called in Korean. More precisely, the name refers to those characters borrowed by Koreans and incorporated into the Korean language w...