The year was 1446. King Sejong the Great issued an official decree making Hangul the official alphabet for the Korean language. Sejong believed that using Hangul, as opposed to Classical Chinese, would increase the literacy rate among the general Korean population, especially the illiterate poor. Indeed, the alphabet's original name was Hunminjeongeum, or the Proper Sounds for the Instruction of the People, as opposed to Hangul, which means Great or Korean Script. The king himself had been involved in the development of the alphabet comprising a mere, fairly easy to remember 28 letters (at the time of writing only 24). Yet Hangul was disparaged by the Korean literati, who continued to use Chinese characters well into the twentieth century.

Eventually, Hangul would only be adopted for official documents in 1894. By then, it had become an expression of Korean nationalism. Forced to open by foreign powers including Japan, the United States and European countries, Koreans were divided between those seeking Japanese-style reform and those wishing to continue traditional Chinese-style economic and societal structures. But all Koreans agreed that they wanted the best for an independent Korea, with the late nineteenth century seeing the emergence of minjok: the idea of Korea's distinct ethnonationalism. Thus, King Gojong accepted Hangul, which Sejong had envisaged in the mid-fifteenth century as an instrument to educate the masses, as an instrument to differentiate Korea from China and Japan in the late nineteenth century.

This very brief account of the origins and officialization of Hangul as the Korean alphabet helps to illustrate Korea's history: a millennia-old sovereign country, surrounded by big powers and in constant need to assert its independence and distinctiveness from these same powers. This conception of Korea and Korea's position in East Asia and across the world continues to inform the politics of the Korean Peninsula as of 2024, including North Korea’s, where Hangul is in fact known as Choson Muncha or Korean Letters, an old term that emphasizes the Korean character of the alphabet.