The language of the kingdom of Baekje (4th to 7th centuries), one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, is poorly attested, and scholars differ on whether one or two languages were used. However, at least some of the material appears to be variety of Old Korean. Description in early texts Baekje was preceded in southwestern Korea by the Mahan confederacy. The Chinese Records of the Three Kingdoms (3rd century) states that the language of Mahan differed from that of Goguryeo to the north and the other Samhan ('Three Han') to the east, Byeonhan and Jinhan, whose languages were said to resemble each other. However, the Book of the Later Han (5th century) speaks of differences between the languages of Byeonhan and Jinhan. Historians believe that Baekje was established by immigrants from Goguryeo who took over Mahan, while Byeonhan and Jinhan were succeeded by Gaya and Silla respectively. According to Book of Liang (635), the language of Baekje was similar to that of Goguryeo. Chapter 49 of the Book of Zhou (636) says of Baekje: Based in this passage and some Baekje words cited in the Japanese history (720), many scholars, beginning with Kōno Rokurō and later Kim Bang-han, have argued that the kingdom of Baekje was bilingual, with the gentry speaking a Puyŏ language and the common people a Han language. The Linguist List defined two codes for these languages, and these have been taken over into the ISO 639-3 registry. Linguistic data There are no extant texts in the Baekje language. The primary contemporary lexical evidence comes from a few glosses in Chinese and Japanese histories, as well as proposed etymologies for old place names. Nihon Shoki The Japanese history , compiled in the early 8th century from earlier documents, including some from Baekje, records 42 Baekje words. These are transcribed as Old Japanese syllables, which are restricted to the form (C)V, limiting the precision of the transcription. Early Japan imported many artifacts from Baekje and the Gaya confederacy, and several of the above matching Old Japanese forms are believed to have been borrowed from Baekje at that time. Such borrowing would also explain the fact that words such as 'father', 'fortress', 'district' and 'hawk' are limited to Western Old Japanese, with no cognates in Eastern Old Japanese or Ryukyuan languages. Moreover, for some words, like 'father' and 'mother', there are alternative words in Old Japanese that are attested