Employing media texts from a Korean newspaper archive, this paper describes the process via which the state took up the ideology of linguistic nationalism during the period of Japanese colonisation of Korea (1910–1945). This was especially aimed at a modernisation project in order for the legacy of the Joseon dynasty, which had reigned Korea for five centuries to the end of the 19th century, to transform itself into a ‘modernized’ nation state. The ways in which Hangul, the Korean alphabet, was socially generated as the legitimate national writing system from one vernacular variety under the colonial regime are explored. This paper claims that while the production of the national writing system acted as a way for anti-colonial movements, it also naturalized differential socioeconomic resource distribution amid Joseon people according to literacy skills in Joseon’s transformation into the modern Korean nation state. This paper debates the restrictions of mobilizing linguistic nationalism as a way of political emancipation.