Unlike Chinese, Koreans have an alphabetical writing system and their language is similar to Turkish, Mongolian, Japanese, and other Central Asian languages and classified as a Ural-Altaic language. Hangul, the Korean alphabet, is composed of 10 vowels and 14 consonants. Under the patronage of King Sejong of Choson dynasty (1393-1910), a group of scholars invented Hangul in 1443. The Korean language has a two-tier system in which indigenous words with no association with Chinese characters and Chinese characters (i.e., words of direct Chinese origin and with an associated Chinese character) vocabularies are both used and can be both written using the phonetically designed Korean alphabet. Currently, the McCune Reischauer system is most widely used for the romanization of Hangul.