Korean mixed script

Korean mixed script 한국어의 국한문혼용 韓國語의 國漢文混用
Type	Alternative – utilizes both logographic (hanja) and alphabetic (Hangul) characters
Languages	Korean language
Time period	1443 to the present
Direction	Left-to-right
ISO 15924	Kore, 287

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

The script has never been used for languages other than Korean. In North Korea, writing in mixed script was replaced by writing only in Hangul in the middle of the 20th century and has not been used since. 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.

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 became common in the 20th century. Up to the 1970s, many books and newspapers were written in mixed Hangul and hanja characters. However, as part of de-Sinicization efforts, then-president Park Chung-hee banned the use of hanja in elementary schools in the 1970s, and restricted their use in middle schools and high schools to special optional classes outside the main Korean language curriculum. Since then, 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). 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).

When writing in Korean mixed script, semantic or content words were generally written in hanja, while grammatical or function words were written in Hangul. It is possible that this encoding of different types of information into different types of characters speeds up reading, allowing the reader to pass over function words and visually focus on content words, and this feature of Korean mixed script has been praised by some observers, as in the following comment by Insup Taylor: