All Around The World

I knew it was gonna happen eventually. The Hangul writing system has spread outside of Korea and is being used by people in another nation.

For those of you who don't know, Hangul is the writing system used in Korea, for the Korean language. You may have seen it before. It looks something like this.

Hangul is probably the easiest writing system in the world. It was created by King Sejong of Korea in the 15th century for the sole purpose of raising literacy rates in Korea. Until then, Chinese characters were used, and only the elite could read. Afterwards, most people, including the poor and uneducated, were able to read. King Sejong claimed that a smart person could learn Hangul in one morning, and a stupid person could learn it within 10 days (how he proved this I don't know). If you think about it, a writing system that allows everyone to read is an incredibly equalizing force. 

And now, a tangent: there's been a movement in America for a while to simplify English spelling. I read an article about it in The Believer a while back. Basically, people in this movement use the same argument that King Sejong did: that a complicated writing system favors the elite, and that a simple writing system would raise literacy rates and make it easier for everyone to read and, as a result, give everyone access to more information. English writing is complicated because it was standardized before the Great Vowel Shift, which was a point in history where the pronunciation of English words dramatically changed. So when English spelling was first standardized, everything was spelled the way it was pronounced, but then pronunciation changed and spelling stayed the same. Anyway, I'll come back to English later.

Now back to the substance of the post: For a really really long time the Hangul writing system was only used for Korea. But it has now spread outside of Korea and is being used by a minority tribe in Indonesia. They're not changing they're language to Korean, they're simply using Hangul as the writing system for their own language. I don't think they will be the last people to adopt Hangul. The English writing system is more versatile than some other writing systems (Japanese, for example), but from all I know (which honestly isn't a whole lot, since I don't know how to read Hangul, although I'd like to think I could learn it in a morning), Hangul seems way easier than English characters. So I do think that as more tribes try to preserve their indigenous languages by creating writing systems for them, many will turn to Hangul.

Which raises the question: if Hangul is so easy, why hasn't it spread already? Well, that's largely because right now English is a global language. I wrote about it before on my other blog (which I haven't updated in forever): as a result of British military imperialism and American cultural imperialism, English is the closest thing to a global language that exists right now. We can argue about the implications of this all we want, but the fact is that I've spent the last 4 1/2 months in three different countries, all of which were in Asia, and in all of them English was somewhat of a second language. I've seen Chinese people talk with Japanese people in English, because it was the only language both of them spoke. I've had people from Japan, Korea, Finland, Denmark, Argentina, and Croatia come up to me without knowing where I was from and speak to me in English, because they had learned it in school and they assumed that I was likely to understand it. English is a global language.

The reason for this is not because English is easy. English is insanely difficult to learn. It's just because English-speaking countries have had a huge global influence. However, having a huge global influence isn't the only important thing. Many economists are predicting that China will become the next world power, at least in terms of economics. However, many linguists are predicting that Chinese will not become a global language, basically because it's one of the world's most difficult languages to learn. It's a tonal language (meaning that one syllable, said with two different tones, can mean two entirely different things), it uses kanji (characters that symbolize words, rather than sounds, which can be pronounced different ways and are insanely difficult to write), and it has no phonetic writing system (unlike the slightly easier Japanese, which uses both kanji and phonetic characters). For one thing, a global language would probably be taught to kids from the time they're young, and teaching kids Chinese is definitely harder than teaching kids English (although English is still really difficult). But more importantly, a global language would have to be able to take words from other languages as well, and this is something that would be very hard in Chinese. 

This is the other reason why English is a global language. It's had a huge global influence, but it can also absorb words from other languages really really easily. This is because English has a massive sound inventory; in other words, many different sounds can exist in English. This is untrue of some languages, such as Japanese. No matter how huge of a global influence Japan has, it would be very difficult to make Japanese a global language. Japanese isn't as hard as Chinese, since it has no tones and has a phonetic writing system, but it's phonetic writing system is nowhere near as versatile as English's. A Japanese word, such as すし (sushi), can easily be written in English, but an English word such as "hamburger" (which was actually taken from German), can't be written perfectly in Japanese. It ends up looking something like ハンバーガー, which is pronounced "hanbahgah." The limits of the writing system are an indirect result of the fact that Japanese's sound inventory is much smaller than English's. To put it another way, there are way more consonant and vowel sounds in English than there are in Japanese. And on a larger scale, English does have a relatively large sound inventory: the average one contains 23 consonants and 9 vowels; English contains 25 consonants and 19 vowels. To put it into more perspective, Japanese contains 15 and 5, Spanish contains 17 and 5, and Nepali, which rivals English, contains 27 and 11, still a total of less sounds than English. Basically, English has many different sounds at its disposal. That's why it can borrow so many words from other languages.

But on the other hand, that's one reason why it's so difficult for many people to learn English: they have to adapt to new sounds that don't exist in their native languages. One of the other main reasons why it's so difficult for people to learn English is the spelling. Which brings me back to Hangul. If Hangul raised the literacy rate in Korea so dramatically, then I think it would be a perfect global writing system. If Hangul were used worldwide, then it would probably be easier for people to communicate globally. Clearly Hangul is being used as a writing system for another language already, so it could probably be used as a writing system for one global language, or for many global languages, whether they be English, Chinese, Spanish, or whatever. Again, from my limited knowledge of Hangul I can't really say whether it could be used in conjunction with English or Chinese (I'd say probably not Chinese, because of the tones), but maybe Korean could be a global language? It's a longshot, but maybe? Once again, this is me speaking with a very limited knowledge, but while Korea hasn't had a huge global influence in the past, it could grow in influence dramatically in the near future, and even if it doesn't, Korean could still be taught in schools the same way that English is now. I don't know how easy the Korean language is in terms of speaking, but I've heard that it's very similar to Japanese, which isn't all that difficult in terms of speaking, although it's insanely difficult in terms of writing. But clearly Korean isn't. I dunno, this is just me rambling at this point. Basically, at the very least, Hangul has huge potential to be a global writing system. And when we talk about global writing systems, generally issues of other languages being destroyed as a result of globalization arise. But we can see that already Hangul is being used to preserve languages rather than destroy them. In conclusion, Hangul rocks. Time for me to peace out.