Middle Korean

Middle Korean is the period in the history of the Korean language succeeding Old Korean and yielding to Early Modern Korean in the late 16th century.

The boundary between the Old and Middle periods is traditionally identified with the establishment of Goryeo in 918 and the associated transition of the prestige dialect from the Southeast to the center of the peninsula, but some scholars have argued for the Mongol invasions of Korea in the mid-13th century. Middle Korean is divided into Early and Late periods corresponding to Goryeo (until 1392) and Joseon respectively.

It is difficult to extract linguistic information from texts of the Early period, which are written with Chinese characters (called Hanja in Korean). The situation was transformed in 1446 by the introduction of the Hangul alphabet, so that Late Middle Korean provides the pivotal data for the history of Korean.

Sources and periodization

Middle Korean is traditionally taken to span the period from the establishment of Goryeo in 918, when the political centre moved from Gyeongju in the southeast to Kaesong in the central west, up to the start of the Imjin War in 1592. The boundary between early and late periods is variously taken as the beginning of the Joseon period in 1392 or the promulgation of Hangul in 1446. The Joseon capital was only a short distance away in Hanyang (modern Seoul), so any language change would have been minimal, but the introduction of Hangul dramatically changed the documentation of the language.

Until the late 19th century, most formal writing in Korea, including government documents, scholarship and much literature, was written in Classical Chinese. Before the 15th century, the little writing in Korean was done using cumbersome systems using Chinese characters, such as idu and hyangchal.