Imagine a writing system so effective it could end illiteracy in days, and a ruling class that rejected it precisely because it worked too well. This episode tells the biography of Hangul, the Korean alphabet, from King Sejong’s frustration with Chinese characters in the 1400s through centuries of elite contempt and outright bans to its status today as a UNESCO-recognized marvel of linguistic design.

The conversation explains why Chinese hanja was a poor fit for spoken Korean, how the 1446 Hunminjeongeum laid out a script whose consonant shapes mimic the position of the tongue, lips and throat, and how letters snap together into syllable blocks sized to sit beside Chinese characters. It follows the script underground after King Yeonsangun’s 1504 ban, where women and Buddhist monks kept it alive and popular novels like Hong Gildong jeon flourished, then traces its rebranding as a symbol of national identity, the Korean Language Society’s defiance under Japanese rule, and the divergent paths taken in North and South Korea.

• Why linguists call Hangul a featural script, and John DeFrancis’s counterargument about how fluent readers actually process it
• How Confucian loyalty to China and elite gatekeeping combined to brand the script as vulgar
• Missionary John Ross’s introduction of word spacing in 1877 and the first Hangul braille in 1897
• The 1933 Unified Hangul Orthography and the 1942 mass arrests of Korean Language Society scholars
• Why the South counts 24 letters, the North counts 40, and how Korean internet slang plays with the script’s shapes