Korean is linked to the Altaic languages of central Asia, a family that includes Turkish, Mongolian, and Tungusic languages of Siberia. The modern Korean writing system, hangul, was devised in 1443. Before hangul, other Korean scripts used a system of Chinese characters to represent the sounds of Korean. Modern Korean still reflects China's influence.Roughly half the Korean vocabulary consists of words derived from Chinese, mainly through the Confucian classics. Hanguel was created for two reasons. First, Chinese characters could not adequately denote Korean speech because of the differences. Also, only the elite could afford the time necessary to study Chinese, so Hangul was invented as a phonetic script both more efficient and more accessible to the common people.
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There is another hypothesis regarding "Altaic" languages that uses historical analysis to come to a different conclusion than does the Altaic hypothesis. The linguists who proposed this alternative theory comparatively studied these languages' developments over time. What they found was that at the oldest form of each language, theoretically when they would have been most similar, owing to a close proximity to an ancestor language, they are more different than they would be later on. While today, these languages share a 20% lexical similarity, this was less in their earlier forms. It is also the case that these languages originated in the same general geographic area, East Asia. Having analyzed the historical changes in lexical similarities and noted the common region which these languages' speakers inhabited, these linguists argue that it is more probable that whatever similarities present were a result of contact, not a common ancestor language.