It’s the 1440s, and we’re in Korea.
King Sejong is frustrated, because he keeps hearing stories of his people trying to learn to read and write, and the people are frustrated. It’s really tough to memorize the thousands of Classical Chinese characters used to convey the Korean language.
The intricate Chinese characters sprawl across the page like an insurmountable mountain range. Farmers and privileged people alike struggle even to get a basic understanding of words and meanings on paper. Memorizing complex characters requires too much time and mental energy that their daily activities just don’t allow.
This is how Hangul came to be.
How Hangul Happened
Recognizing the urgent need for change, King Sejong assembled an elite group of scholars, linguists, and intellectuals. Their mission was bold: to create a writing system from scratch that would be intuitive enough for any Korean to achieve literacy with minimal effort.
Months of intense debate and hard work followed.
Each and every character was meticulously crafted with logic and simplicity as guiding principles.
In 1443, the world was introduced to Hangul. It consisted of just 28 characters at its inception, with each designed to mimic the shape the mouth makes when forming that particular sound. This made it phonetic, straightforward, and, most importantly, accessible. No longer would one need years of laborious study to read a sentence or write a letter. With Hangul, literacy could be achieved in a much shorter time frame.
So, unlike every language before it, Hangul didn’t evolve from previous writing over generations or hundreds of years. It was engineered from whole cloth.
In its very design, Hangul challenged the status quo, providing a model for what happens when technological foresight meets linguistic tradition. And so, within a society constrained by the limitations of an archaic writing system, Hangul was nothing short of a revolution—changing not just how Koreans wrote, but how they thought, communicated, and even perceived themselves.
Engineered Language
Given Hangul’s obvious logic, you might imagine that a bunch of other languages followed King Sejong’s idea. However, the script took a few centuries for its effects on literacy to be fully felt. The Korean elite, enjoying privilege based on tradition, naturally saw it as inferior to Classical Chinese.
Nevertheless, in modern times, South Korea has one of the highest literacy rates in the world, above 97%. Clearly, Hangul helped a great deal, and the world has taken notice. Over time, inventors and linguists have tried to re-engineer language, creating new alphabets or even entire linguistic systems with similar ambitions.
Esperanto is probably the best example of such a language. The concept was for Esperanto to serve as a universal second language, in order to foster international communication and understanding. It’s predominantly based on Indo-European roots, and it’s most easily picked up by people who speak languages common in Europe, so it’s not exactly universally accessible… but given the time frame and place where it was created (Poland, 1880s), the math checks out.
Written and spoken languages aren’t the only types of engineered languages, either.
American Sign Language (ASL) is a kind of hybrid between a language that emerges organically over time, and one that’s specifically designed. Developed in the 19th century, it incorporated elements from existing French and local sign languages. ASL was not built from scratch like Hangul, but it has been carefully refined to be both expressive and easy to learn. It’s also democratizing, just as Hangul was, and just as Esperanto was designed to be.
Braille is another example of this sort of language. Louis Braille lost his vision at age 3, and by the time he was 15, he had invented a new language. The existing “night writing” system, which was a tactile writing system with 12 “dots”, was too complex, so Braille simplified the number of dots to only 6. A whole subset of the human population now had a much easier time reading and communicating.
The Power of Intentional Language Design
Language is a form of technology. It can be invented from scratch, or it can evolve over time. Clearly, the intentional design of languages has the power to alter societies, increase literacy, and even affect the way we interact with the world.
As technology advances, we find ourselves at the edge of another frontier: ChatGPT and other LLM tools are able to read and write in many languages, including the language of computer code. These tools have the potential to revolutionize language learning and probably even the way language is created.
To close on a somewhat playful note, one invented language I’ve neglected to mention so far is Klingon. Star Trek enthusiasts (read as “uber-nerds”) have created a relatively simple language designed to fit well into Gene Roddenberry’s universe, but also to be spoken and written.
Will there be new languages we invent in order to communicate with one another? Most importantly, what are some fictional languages you know about?
Let me know in the comments.
I'm Nairobi, we have sheng used in ghetto.
So many languages. I’ve always found the ones limited to very small areas like an island. And then there are the languages that are inspired by entertainment like Klingon or Vulcan.