page_title: Hangul
section_title: Mixed scripts
hierarchical_section_title: Hangul / Orthography / Mixed scripts
caption_attribution_description: English: Building sign with the city of Gardena written in mixed Latin-hangul script
context_page_description: The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, is a writing system for the Korean language created by King Sejong the Great in 1443. The letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs used to pronounce them, and they are systematically modified to indicate phonetic features; similarly, the vowel letters are systematically modified for related sounds, making Hangul a featural writing system.
  Modern Hangul orthography uses 24 basic letters: 14 consonant letters and 10 vowel letters. There are also 19 complex letters: 5 tense consonants and 11 complex vowels combining the basic letters. Four letters in the original alphabet are no longer used: 1 vowel letter and 3 consonant letters.
  The Korean letters are written in syllabic blocks with the alphabetic letters arranged in two dimensions. For example, the Korean word for "honeybee" is written 꿀벌, not ㄲㅜㄹㅂㅓㄹ. As it combines the features of alphabetic and syllabic writing systems, it has been described as an "alphabetic syllabary."
context_section_description: Since the Late Joseon dynasty period, various Hanja-Hangul mixed systems were used. In these systems, Hanja were used for lexical roots, and the Korean alphabet for grammatical words and inflections, much as kanji and kana are used in Japanese. Hanja have been almost entirely phased out of daily use in North Korea, and in South Korea they are mostly restricted to parenthetical glosses for proper names and for disambiguating homonyms.
  Indo-Arabic numerals are mixed in with the Korean alphabet, e.g. 2007년 3월 22일 (22 March 2007).
  Latin script and occasionally other scripts may be sprinkled within Korean texts for illustrative purposes, or for unassimilated loanwords. Very occasionally non-Hangul letters may be mixed into Korean syllabic blocks, as Gㅏ Ga at right.
caption: The U.S. city of Gardena in the Korean alphabet, with the [ɡ] written as Latin ⟨G⟩. (Compare this large ⟨G⟩ with the smaller ⟨G⟩ in all-Latin Gardena below: The large ⟨G⟩ is fused (at bottom-right) with the Korean alphabet ⟨ㄱ⟩ that would normally be used to transcribe Gardena.)
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