'' (), a 19th-century primer for teaching Vietnamese children Chinese characters. The work is attributed to Emperor
Tự Đức, the fourth emperor of the Nguyễn dynasty. In this primer, chữ Nôm is used to gloss the Chinese characters, for example, is used to gloss . Chinese characters were introduced to Vietnam after the
Han dynasty conquered Nanyue in 111 BC. Independence was achieved after the
Battle of Bạch Đằng in 938, but
Literary Chinese was
adopted for official purposes in 1010. For most of the period up to the early 20th century, formal writing was indistinguishable from contemporaneous classical Chinese works produced in China, Korea, and
Japan. Vietnamese scholars were thus intimately familiar with Chinese writing. In order to record their native language, they applied the structural principles of Chinese characters to develop chữ Nôm. The new script was mostly used to record folk songs and for other popular literature. Vietnamese written in chữ Nôm briefly replaced Chinese for official purposes under the
Hồ dynasty (1400–1407) and under the
Tây Sơn (1778–1802), but in both cases this was swiftly reversed.
Early development The use of Chinese characters to transcribe the Vietnamese language can be traced to an inscription with the two characters "", as part of the posthumous title of
Phùng Hưng, a national hero who succeeded in briefly expelling the Chinese in the late 8th century. The two characters have literal Chinese meanings 'cloth' and 'cover', which make no sense in this context. They have thus been interpreted as a phonetic transcription, via their
Middle Chinese pronunciations , of a Vietnamese phrase, either 'great king', or 'father and mother' (of the people). After Vietnam established its independence from China in the 10th century,
Đinh Bộ Lĩnh (r. 968–979), the founder of the
Đinh dynasty, named the country . The first and third Chinese characters mean 'great' and 'Viet'. The second character was often used to transcribe non-Chinese terms and names phonetically. In this context, is an obsolete Vietnamese word for 'big'. The oldest surviving inscription using Chinese characters to transcribe Vietnamese names is on a stele at the Báo Ân pagoda in Tháp Miếu village (
Phúc Yên,
Vĩnh Phúc province). The inscription, re-engraved in the 18th century from an original dating from 1209, is written in Chinese but includes names of 21 people and villages written in an early form of Nom. Another stele at Hộ Thành Sơn in
Ninh Bình Province (1343) is reported as listing 20 villages.
Trần Nhân Tông (r. 1278–1293) ordered that Nôm be used to communicate his proclamations to the people. The first literary writing in Vietnamese is said to have been an
incantation in verse composed in 1282 by the Minister of Justice
Nguyễn Thuyên and thrown into the
Red River to expel a menacing
crocodile. Four poems written in Nom from the Tran dynasty, two by Trần Nhân Tông and one each by
Huyền Quang and
Mạc Đĩnh Chi, were collected and published in 1805. The Nôm text ('Sūtra explained by the Buddha on the Great Repayment of the Heavy Debt to Parents') was printed around 1730, but conspicuously avoids the character , suggesting that it was written (or copied) during the reign of
Lê Lợi (1428–1433). Based on archaic features of the text compared with the Tran dynasty poems, including an exceptional number of words with initial consonant clusters written with pairs of characters, some scholars suggest that it is a copy of an earlier original, perhaps as early as the 12th century.
Hồ dynasty (1400–1407) and Ming conquest (1407–1427) During the seven years of the
Hồ dynasty (1400–1407) Classical Chinese was discouraged in favor of vernacular Vietnamese written in Nôm, which became the official script. The emperor
Hồ Quý Ly even ordered the translation of the
Book of Documents into Nôm and pushed for reinterpretation of Confucian thoughts in his book
Minh đạo. These efforts were reversed with the fall of the Hồ and
Chinese conquest of 1407, lasting twenty years, during which use of the vernacular language and demotic script were suppressed. During the
Ming dynasty occupation of Vietnam, chữ Nôm printing blocks, texts and inscriptions were thoroughly destroyed; as a result the earliest surviving texts of chữ Nôm post-date the occupation.
15th to 19th centuries Chữ Nôm was not reinstated as the official script after the demise of the
Hồ dynasty and restoration of Viet rule. Very few extant vernacular texts in Nôm predate the 15th century and even many later texts in Nôm were translations or rewritings of works in Chinese. During the 15th and 16th centuries, reformist governments translated
Chinese Classics into Nôm, but these translations have not survived due to being seen as subversive by successive governments. As a result of its marginalized nature and lack of institutional backing, chữ Nôm was used as a medium for social protest during the
Lê dynasty (1428–1789), leading to its banning in 1663, 1718, and 1760. While almost all official writings and documents continued to be written in
Classical Chinese until the early 20th century, Nôm was used for popular literary compositions. The corpus of Nôm writings grew over time as did more scholarly compilations of the script itself. Among the earlier works in Nôm of this era are the writings of
Nguyễn Trãi (1380–1442) which aimed to disseminate
Neo-Confucianism among as broad an audience as possible. , consort of King
Lê Thần Tông, is generally given credit for '''' (; 'guide to Southern Jade sounds: explanations and meanings'), a 24,000-character bilingual Hán-to-Nôm
dictionary compiled between the 15th and 18th centuries, most likely in 1641 or 1761. The
Tây Sơn dynasty (1778–1802) mandated the use of Nôm in both government business and civil service examinations but their policy was reverted after the dynasty's collapse.
Gia Long (r. 1802–1820), founder of the
Nguyễn dynasty (1802–1945), supported chữ Nôm only for as long as it took for him to become emperor and then immediately reverted to Chinese. His successor,
Minh Mạng (r. 1820–1841), the second emperor of the Nguyễn dynasty, prohibited the use of Nôm in the government. Nôm reached its golden period with the Nguyễn dynasty in the 19th century as it became a vehicle for diverse genres, from novels to theatrical pieces, and instructional manuals. Apogees of Vietnamese literature emerged with
Nguyễn Du's
The Tale of Kiều and
Hồ Xuân Hương's poetry. Although literacy in premodern Vietnam was limited to just 3 to 5 percent of the population, nearly every village had someone who could read Nôm aloud for the benefit of other villagers. Thus these Nôm works circulated orally in the villages, and were accessible even to the illiterates. Nôm was used as the dominant script in
Vietnamese Catholic literature until the late 19th century. In 1838,
Jean-Louis Taberd compiled a Nôm dictionary, helping with the standardization of the script. The reformist Catholic scholar
Nguyễn Trường Tộ presented the Emperor
Tự Đức with a series of unsuccessful petitions (written in Classical Chinese, like all court documents) proposing reforms in several areas of government and society. His petition ( 'Eight urgent matters', 1867), includes proposals on education, including a section entitled ('Please tolerate the national voice'). He proposed to replace Classical Chinese with Vietnamese written using a script based on Chinese characters that he called ( 'Han characters with national pronunciations'), though he described this as a new creation, and did not mention chữ Nôm. Despite the increasing use of Nôm for popular literature and as a medium for oral dissemination in rural areas, this composite script was never able to supplant Classical Chinese as the primary script of Vietnam. It was highly complex and inefficient, requiring the user to have some prior knowledge of the Chinese script. It was accessible to less than five percent of the Vietnamese population who had already mastered written Chinese and served primarily as a way to learn Classical Chinese and to record folk literature. The small number of literati who took Nôm seriously had to contend with their peers and make sure not to offend their sense of propriety. Even figures known to have written in Nôm such as
Lê Thánh Tông and Nguyễn Trãi were more renowned for their Chinese language writings. According to language researcher Nguyen Thuy Dan, the majority of the Vietnamese elite up to the 19th century seem to have never written in anything but Classical Chinese and even criticized the use of Nôm.
French Indochina and the Latin alphabet From the latter half of the 19th century onwards, the
French colonial authorities discouraged or simply banned the use of classical
Chinese, and promoted the use of the Vietnamese alphabet, which they viewed as a stepping stone toward learning French. Language reform movements in other Asian nations stimulated Vietnamese interest in the subject. Following the
Russo-Japanese War of 1905, Japan was increasingly cited as a model for modernization. The Confucian education system was compared unfavourably to the Japanese system of public education. According to a polemic by writer
Phan Châu Trinh, "so-called Confucian scholars" lacked knowledge of the modern world, as well as real understanding of Han literature. Their degrees showed only that they had learned how to write characters, he claimed. The popularity of Hanoi's short-lived
Tonkin Free School suggested that broad reform was possible. In 1910, the colonial school system adopted a "Franco-Vietnamese curriculum", which emphasized French and alphabetic Vietnamese. The traditional Civil Service Examination, which emphasized the command of classical Chinese, was dismantled in 1915 in
Tonkin and was given for the last time at the imperial capital of
Huế on January 4, 1919. The examination system, and the education system based on it, had been in effect for almost 900 years. However, estimates of the literacy rate in the late 1930s range from 5% to 20%. By 1953, literacy (using the alphabet) had risen to 70%. The
Gin people, descendants of 16th-century migrants from Vietnam to islands off
Dongxing in southern
China, now speak a form of
Yue Chinese and Vietnamese, but their priests use songbooks and scriptures written in chữ Nôm in their ceremonies. ==Texts==