Korean Mixed Script - History

History

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, similar to Japanese.

Using Hangul to write Sino-Korean words only became common in the 20th century. 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. Modern texts – whether or not they contain a significant amount of native Korean vocabulary – rarely use hanja for all, or even most, of the Sino-Korean words in the text. Today, this development has reached the point at which 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 disambiguation). Only a few people still write in the mixed script. Furthermore, the way in which hanja are used 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.

Hanja still appear in many newspapers' headlines, where they serve to both disambiguate and abbreviate, 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).