24. Hangul for marriage!
At 10 AM on October 31, 2028, something incredible happened that shook the whole world. It was none other than that, after the two previous internal meetings had resolved even minor issues and confirmed that everything was fine, the president of ‘Molisha’, Sam, finally announced through a special speech that starting January 1, 2030, ‘Molisha’ letters would be used as the writing system for the ‘Molisha’ language, using Hangul in parallel with the current letters, and that the previous letters would maintain their writing system until then, but starting from January 1, 2035, five years later, the writing system for the ‘Molisha’ language would be changed to the official writing system that only uses Hangul.
This means that Hangul will be officially used along with the existing letters after a preparation period of about a year. And furthermore, from 2035, the ‘Molisha’ language will be written only in Hangul. Therefore, during the preparation period until 2030, all public officials were officially instructed to make efforts to ensure that this system is well established through realistic preparations necessary for implementation, while also requesting cooperation from all citizens. Now, it literally means that the ‘Molisha’ language is expressed in Hangul.
This news was instantly transmitted to each country through the radio waves. And above all, there was one country that was surprised and excited the most, and that was the Republic of Korea. This is because there has been no such joyful news since Hangul was created in 1443 and promulgated in 1446. Hangul, which King Sejong the Great organized and created, is now being used as an official character to write the languages of other countries. Moreover, the ‘Korean Language Society’ and the ‘Korean Language Research Institute’, especially the students of the Korean language departments of all universities who are studying to teach Korean! And all the organizations, groups, and people related to Hangeul were so happy that they held each other’s hands or hugged each other, jumping for joy as if they were at a festival.
And tears of joy flowed from my eyes, which had been dreaming of this scene for a long time. Just as most daughters get sad when they get married, shouldn’t Hangeul be sad when it gets married? But instead, tears of joy flowed out. I am neither a scholar nor an expert on the Korean language. However, for the past 20 years, I have taught Korean at Hangeul School in the hope that our children and junior Koreans living abroad can grow up with a sense of identity and pride as Koreans, and that Koreans can converse and write with each other in Korean. And it was because I felt that the results of opening a Korean Cultural Center and teaching Korean conversation to locals there were so great that it seemed like a great result.
In fact, looking back, even though I am not an expert and even though there are only a few students at a Korean language school, and the number of locals learning Korean is even smaller, where did the strength and sense of mission that allowed me to build relationships with them through communication and conversation using Korean and Korean come from? Was it from my feelings about the past years? I think I will be able to teach Korean and Korean to Koreans and people from other countries with even more pride in the future. And that alone makes me happy. Perhaps this feeling is even more heart-wrenching and moving to all Koreans living abroad who hear this news, and especially to all the teachers who teach Korean and Korean there. Although we live in different countries, this news made us realize once again that we are all the same people with the same heart.
In this way, not only in Korea, but also in other countries, reporters from other countries were busy reporting this news to their countries every day under the title, “The Victory of Hangul!” And accordingly, while predicting what the future outlook would be like, each person evaluated it from their own perspective, envied it, and made predictions that this would become a domino effect in which many countries and peoples without a written language would reform their written language and adopt Hangul as a written language to write their own and their own languages. And accordingly, while calculating the economic benefits for South Korea in the future, they even predicted that South Korea would become the center of the world economy with this one written language. And along with that, a reporter from far away Africa was pressing the send button on his computer to send his newspaper article that stated, ‘South Koreans knew that Hangul would make the language they used more beautiful.’