THE ROLE OF HANJA IN KOREA: LANGUAGE, SCHOOLARSHIP AND SOCIETY.
Keywords:
Chinese characters; Korea; Hanja in Korea; Idu script; Hanmun; Hanja–Hangul transition; Sino‑Korean vocabulary; Korean historical writing,Abstract
This article examines the historical role of 漢字 (Hanja) in Korea, highlighting how it shaped scholarly culture and state administration. Since Korean and Chinese are structurally different, Koreans developed systems such as 향찰 (Hyangchal), and 구결 (Gugyeol) to adapt Chinese characters to Korean grammar and phonology.
References
Lee, Peter H.; S. Robert Ramsey. A History of the Korean Language.
Yoo, Haneul; Jiho Jin; Juhee Son; JinYeong Bak; Kyunghyun Cho; Alice Oh. “HUE: Pretrained Model and Dataset for Understanding Hanja Documents of Ancient Korea.” 2022.
Song, Seyoung; Nawon Kim; Songeun Chae; Kiwoong Park; Jiho Jin; Haneul Yoo; Kyunghyun Cho; Alice Oh. “Open Korean Historical Corpus: A Millennia‑Scale Diachronic Collection of Public Domain Texts.” 2025. Choo, Sungjae. “The use of Hanja (Chinese characters) in Korean toponyms: Practices and issues.”
