Since the beginning of the
Chinese rule (known to
Vietnamese historians as "Northern Domination") in 111 BC, Vietnam had been heavily influenced by
Chinese culture and its literature, government papers, scholarly works and religious scripture were all written in
Literary Chinese (, ) while indigenous writing with started around the ninth century. In the 12th century, several Vietnamese words began to be written in '''', which was based on
Chinese characters but supplemented with Vietnamese-invented
logographic characters made from
Chinese character radicals, to represent native Vietnamese words. These characters were adapted or created
using methods such as phono-semantic compounds (, ), double-phonetic compounds (, ), and borrowing the character for its pronunciation (, ).
Name People have called the Latinized script of Vietnamese at least since 1867. In 1867, scholar
Trương Vĩnh Ký published two grammar books. The first book is (Tips to teach and learn French), a Vietnamese book written in about French grammar. In this book, the Latinized script of Vietnamese was called (not ). The second book is (Simplification of Annamite grammar), a French book about Vietnamese grammar. In this book, the Latinized script of Vietnamese was called (European alphabet), (Latin characters). On
Gia Dinh Bao April 15th issue of 1867, when mentioned the French book about Vietnamese grammar, the name was used to indicate the Latinized script of Vietnamese.
Creation of As early as 1620, with the work of
Francisco de Pina, Portuguese and Italian
Jesuit missionaries in Vietnam began using Latin script to transcribe the Vietnamese language as an assistance for learning the language. These efforts led eventually to the development of the present Vietnamese alphabet. For 200 years, was used within the Catholic community. However, works written in the Vietnamese alphabet saw limited use, while Catholic texts in
chữ Nôm were significantly more widespread. thus remained the principal writing system used by Vietnamese Catholics during this period. The Latin alphabet then became a means to publish Vietnamese popular literature, which was disparaged as vulgar by the Chinese-educated imperial elites. Historian Pamela A. Pears asserted that by instituting the Latin alphabet in Vietnam, the French cut the Vietnamese from their traditional Hán Nôm literature. An important reason why Latin script became the standard writing system in Vietnam but not in
Cambodia and
Laos, which were both dominated by the French for a similar amount of time under the same colonial framework, had to do with the
Nguyễn Emperors of Vietnam heavily promoting its usage. According to the historian
Liam Kelley in his 2016 work "Emperor Thành Thái’s Educational Revolution" neither the French nor the revolutionaries had enough power to spread the usage of down to the village level.
Mass education Between 1907 and 1908, the short-lived
Tonkin Free School promulgated '''' and taught French language to the general population. In 1917, the French system suppressed Vietnam's
Confucian examination system, viewed as an aristocratic system linked with the "ancient regime", thereby forcing Vietnamese elites to educate their offspring in the French language education system. While traditional nationalists favoured the Confucian examination system and the use of
chữ Hán, Vietnamese revolutionaries, progressive nationalists, and pro-French elites viewed the French education system as a means to "liberate" the Vietnamese from old Chinese domination and the unsatisfactory "outdated" Confucian examination system, to democratize education and to help bridge Vietnamese to European philosophies. The French colonial system then set up another educational system, teaching Vietnamese as a first language using '
in primary school and then the French language (taught in '). Hundreds of thousands of textbooks for primary education began to be published in '''', with the unintentional result of turning the script into the popular medium for the expression for Vietnamese culture.
Late 20th century to present Typesetting and printing Vietnamese has been challenging due to its number of accents/diacritics. This had led to the use of accent and diacritic-less names in
Overseas Vietnamese, such as
Viet instead of the proper
Việt. Contemporary Vietnamese texts sometimes include words which have not been adapted to modern Vietnamese orthography, especially for documents written in
chữ Hán. French, which left a mark on the Vietnamese language in the form of
loanwords and other influences, is no longer as widespread in Vietnam, with
English or
International English the preferred European language for commerce.
Computing The universal character set
Unicode has full support for the Latin Vietnamese writing system, although it does not have a separate segment for it. The required characters that other languages use are scattered throughout the
Basic Latin,
Latin-1 Supplement,
Latin Extended-A and
Latin Extended-B blocks; those that remain (such as the letters with
dau hoi) are placed in the
Latin Extended Additional block. An
ASCII-based writing convention,
Vietnamese Quoted Readable and several byte-based encodings including
VSCII (TCVN), VNI,
VISCII and
Windows-1258 were widely used before Unicode became popular. Most new documents now exclusively use the Unicode format
UTF-8. Unicode allows the user to choose between
precomposed characters and
combining characters in inputting Vietnamese. Because in the past some fonts implemented combining characters in a nonstandard way (see
Verdana font), most people use precomposed characters when composing Vietnamese-language documents (except on Windows where
Windows-1258 used combining characters). Most keyboards on modern phone and computer operating systems, including iOS, Android and MacOS, have now supported the Vietnamese language and direct input of diacritics by default. Previously, Vietnamese users had to manually install
free software such as
Unikey on computers or Laban Key on phones to type Vietnamese diacritics. These keyboards support input methods such as
Telex.
Unicode code points The following table provides Unicode code points for all non-ASCII Vietnamese letters. ==See also==