Vietnamese alphabet

Consonants

The alphabet is largely derived from Portuguese with some influence from French, although the usage of ⟨gh⟩ and ⟨gi⟩ was borrowed from Italian (compare ghetto, Giuseppe) and that for ⟨c, k, qu⟩ from (Latinised) Greek and Latin (compare canis, kinesis, quō vādis), mirroring the English usage of these letters (compare cat, kite, queen).

There is one trigraph, ⟨ngh⟩, and ten digraphs: ⟨ch⟩, ⟨gh⟩, ⟨gi⟩, ⟨kh⟩, ⟨ng⟩, ⟨nh⟩, ⟨ph⟩, ⟨qu⟩, ⟨th⟩, ⟨tr⟩.

• Each consonant can also be called by the consonant followed by ờ, except for k. So b would be called bờ, c would be called cờ and so on.

Vowels

Pronunciation

The correspondence between the orthography and pronunciation is somewhat complicated. In some cases, the same letter may represent several different sounds, and different letters may represent the same sound. This is because the orthography was designed centuries ago and the spoken language has changed, as shown in the chart directly above that contrasts the difference between Middle and Modern Vietnamese.

⟨i⟩ and ⟨y⟩ are mostly equivalent, and there is no concrete rule that says when to use one or the other, except in sequences like ⟨ay⟩ and ⟨uy⟩ (i.e. tay 'arm, hand' is read as while tai 'ear' is read as ). There have been attempts since the late 20th century to standardize the orthography by replacing ⟨y⟩ with ⟨i⟩ when it represents a vowel, the latest being a decision from the Vietnamese Ministry of Education in 1984. These efforts seem to have had limited effect. In textbooks published by Nhà Xuất bản Giáo dục ('Publishing House of Education'), ⟨y⟩ is used to represent only in Sino-Vietnamese words that are written with one letter ⟨y⟩ alone (diacritics can still be added, as in ⟨ý⟩, ⟨ỷ⟩), at the beginning of a syllable when followed by ⟨ê⟩ (as in yếm, yết), after ⟨u⟩ and in the sequence ⟨ay⟩; therefore such forms as *lý and *kỹ are not "standard", though they are much preferred elsewhere. Most people and the popular media continue to use the spelling that they are most accustomed to.

The uses of ⟨i⟩ and ⟨y⟩ to represent the phoneme can be categorized as "standard" (as used in textbooks published by Nhà Xuất bản Giáo dục) and "non-standard" as follows.

This "standard" set by Nhà Xuất bản Giáo dục is not definite. It is unknown why the literature books use Lí while the history books use Lý.

Spelling

Vowel nuclei

The table below shows the vowels of Hanoi Vietnamese (written in the IPA) and the corresponding orthographic symbols.

Notes:

• The vowel is:
  • usually written ⟨i⟩: = sĩ (a suffix indicating profession, similar to the English suffix -er).
  • sometimes written ⟨y⟩ after ⟨h⟩, ⟨k⟩, ⟨l⟩, ⟨m⟩, ⟨n⟩, ⟨s⟩, ⟨t⟩, ⟨v⟩, ⟨x⟩: = Mỹ 'America'
  • It is always written ⟨y⟩ when:
    1. preceded by an orthographic vowel: = khuyên 'to advise';
    2. at the beginning of a word derived from Chinese (written as ⟨i⟩ otherwise): = yêu 'to love'.
• The vowel is written ⟨oo⟩ before ⟨c⟩ or ⟨ng⟩ (since ⟨o⟩ in that position represents ): = oóc 'organ (musical)'; = kính coong. This generally only occurs in recent loanwords or when representing dialectal pronunciation.
• Similarly, the vowel is written ⟨ôô⟩ before ⟨c⟩ or ⟨ng⟩: = ôông (Nghệ An/Hà Tĩnh variant of ông ). But unlike ⟨oo⟩ being frequently used in onomatopoeia, transcriptions from other languages and words "borrowed" from Nghệ An/Hà Tĩnh dialects (such as voọc), ⟨ôô⟩ seems to be used solely to convey the feel of the Nghệ An/Hà Tĩnh accents. In transcriptions, ⟨ô⟩ is preferred (e.g. các-tông 'cardboard', ắc-coóc-đê-ông 'accordion').

Diphthongs and triphthongs

Notes:

The glide is written:

• ⟨u⟩ after (spelled ⟨q⟩ in this instance)
• ⟨o⟩ in front of ⟨a⟩, ⟨ă⟩, or ⟨e⟩ except after ⟨q⟩
• ⟨o⟩ following ⟨a⟩ and ⟨e⟩
• ⟨u⟩ in all other cases; is written as ⟨au⟩ instead of *⟨ăw⟩ (cf. ⟨ao⟩ ), and that is written as ⟨y⟩ after ⟨y⟩

The off-glide is written as ⟨i⟩ except after ⟨â⟩ and ⟨ă⟩, where it is written as ⟨y⟩; is written as ⟨ay⟩ instead of *⟨ăy⟩ (cf. ai ).

The diphthong is written:

• ⟨ia⟩ at the end of a syllable: = mía 'sugar cane'
• iê before a consonant or off-glide: = miếng 'piece'; = xiêu 'to slope, slant'

The ⟨i⟩ of the diphthong changes to ⟨y⟩ after ⟨u⟩:

• ⟨ya⟩: = khuya 'late at night'
• ⟨yê⟩: = khuyên 'to advise'

⟨iê⟩ changes to ⟨yê⟩ at the beginning of a syllable (⟨ia⟩ does not change):

• = yên 'calm'; yếu 'weak, feeble'

The diphthong is written:

• ⟨ua⟩ at the end of a syllable: = mua 'to buy'
• ⟨uô⟩ before a consonant or off-glide: = muôn 'ten thousand'; = xuôi 'down'

The diphthong is written:

• ⟨ưa⟩ at the end of a syllable: = mưa 'to rain'
• ⟨ươ⟩ before a consonant or off-glide: = mương 'irrigation canal'; = tưới 'to water, irrigate, sprinkle'

Tone marks

Vietnamese is a tonal language, so the meaning of each word depends on the pitch in which it is pronounced. Tones are marked in the IPA as suprasegmentals following the phonemic value. Some tones are also associated with a glottalization pattern.

There are six distinct tones in the standard northern dialect. The first one ("level tone") is not marked and the other five are indicated by diacritics applied to the vowel part of the syllable. The tone names are chosen such that the name of each tone is spoken in the tone it identifies.

In the south, there is a merging of the hỏi and ngã tones, in effect leaving five tones.

• *: Z (in TELEX) and 0 (in VNI) keys are used to remove the mark. For example, in VNI, U2 → ⟨ù⟩, then press 0 → ⟨u⟩.
• Unmarked vowels are pronounced with a level voice, in the middle of the speaking range.
• The grave accent indicates that the speaker should start somewhat low and drop slightly in tone, with the voice becoming increasingly breathy.
• The hook indicates in Northern Vietnamese that the speaker should start in the middle range and fall, but in Southern Vietnamese that the speaker should start somewhat low and fall, then rise (as when asking a question in English).
• In the North, a perispomene indicates that the speaker should start mid, break off (with a glottal stop), then start again and rise like a question in tone. In the South, it is realized identically to the Hỏi tone.
• The acute accent indicates that the speaker should start mid and rise sharply in tone.
• The dot or cross signifies in Northern Vietnamese that the speaker starts low and fall lower in tone, with the voice becoming increasingly creaky and ending in a glottal stop.

In syllables where the vowel part consists of more than one vowel (such as diphthongs and triphthongs), the placement of the tone is still a matter of debate. Generally, there are two methodologies, an "old style" and a "new style". While the "old style" emphasizes aesthetics by placing the tone mark as close as possible to the center of the word (by placing the tone mark on the last vowel if an ending consonant part exists and on the next-to-last vowel if the ending consonant does not exist, as in hóa, hủy), the "new style" emphasizes linguistic principles and tries to apply the tone mark on the main vowel (as in hoá, huỷ). In both styles, when one vowel already has a quality diacritic on it, the tone mark must be applied to it as well, regardless of where it appears in the syllable (thus thuế is acceptable while *thúê is not). In the case of the ⟨ươ⟩ diphthong, the mark is placed on the ⟨ơ⟩. The ⟨u⟩ in ⟨qu⟩ is considered part of the consonant. Currently, the new style is usually used in textbooks published by Nhà Xuất bản Giáo dục, while most people still prefer the old style in casual uses. Among Overseas Vietnamese communities, the old style is predominant for all purposes.

In lexical ordering, differences in letters are treated as primary, differences in tone markings as secondary and differences in case as tertiary differences. (Letters include for instance ⟨a⟩ and ⟨ă⟩ but not ⟨ẳ⟩. Older dictionaries also treated digraphs and trigraphs like ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨ngh⟩ as base letters.) Ordering according to primary and secondary differences proceeds syllable by syllable. According to this principle, a dictionary lists tuân thủ before tuần chay because the secondary difference in the first syllable takes precedence over the primary difference in the second syllable.

Structure

In the past, syllables in multisyllabic words were concatenated with hyphens, but this practice has died out and hyphenation is now reserved for word-borrowings from other languages. A written syllable consists of at most three parts, in the following order from left to right:

1. An optional beginning consonant part
2. A required vowel syllable nucleus and the tone mark, if needed, applied above or below it
3. An ending consonant part, can only be one of the following: ⟨c⟩, ⟨ch⟩, ⟨m⟩, ⟨n⟩, ⟨ng⟩, ⟨nh⟩, ⟨p⟩, ⟨t⟩, or nothing.

History

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 (漢文, Hán văn) while indigenous writing with chữ Hán started around the ninth century. In the 12th century, several Vietnamese words began to be written in chữ Nôm, 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 (形聲, hình thanh), double-phonetic compounds (會音, hội âm), and borrowing the character for its pronunciation (假借, giả tá).

Name

People have called the Latinized script of Vietnamese chữ Quốc ngữ at least since 1867. In 1867, scholar Trương Vĩnh Ký published two grammar books. The first book is Mẹo luật dạy học tiếng pha-lang-sa (Tips to teach and learn French), a Vietnamese book written in chữ Quốc ngữ about French grammar. In this book, the Latinized script of Vietnamese was called chữ quốc ngự (not ngữ). The second book is Abrégé de grammaire annamite (Simplification of Annamite grammar), a French book about Vietnamese grammar. In this book, the Latinized script of Vietnamese was called l'alphabet européen (European alphabet), les caractères latins (Latin characters). On Gia Dinh Bao April 15th issue of 1867, when mentioned the French book about Vietnamese grammar, the name chữ quốc ngữ was used to indicate the Latinized script of Vietnamese. The script was also referred to as chữ Nôm Latinh ('Romanized vernacular') at the First Tonkin Synod in 1900 and the Second Tonkin Synod in 1912.

Creation of chữ Quốc ngữ

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. The work was continued by the Avignonese Alexandre de Rhodes. Building on previous dictionaries by Gaspar do Amaral and António Barbosa, Rhodes compiled the Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum, a Vietnamese–Portuguese–Latin dictionary, which was later printed in Rome in 1651, using their spelling system. These efforts led eventually to the development of the present Vietnamese alphabet. For 200 years, chữ Quốc ngữ 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. Chữ Nôm thus remained the principal writing system used by Vietnamese Catholics during this period.

Colonial period

In 1910, the French colonial administration enforced chữ Quốc ngữ. 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 chữ Quốc ngữ down to the village level. It was by the imperial decree of Emperor Thành Thái in 1906 that parents could decide whether their children would follow a curriculum in Hán văn (漢文) or Nam âm (南音, 'Southern sound', the contemporary Vietnamese name for chữ Quốc ngữ). This decree was issued at the same time when other social changes, such as the cutting of long male hair, were occurring. The main reason for the popularisation of the Latin alphabet in Vietnam/Đại Nam during the Nguyễn dynasty (the French protectorates of Annam and Tonkin) was because of the pioneering efforts by intellectuals from French Cochinchina combined with the progressive and scientific policies of the French government in French Indochina that created the momentum for the usage of chữ Quốc ngữ to spread.

From the first days it was recognized that the Chinese language was a barrier between us and the natives; the education provided by means of the hieroglyphic characters was completely beyond us; this writing makes possible only with difficulty transmitting to the population the diverse ideas which are necessary for them at the level of their new political and commercial situation. Consequently we are obliged to follow the traditions of our own system of education; it is the only one which can bring close to us the Annamites of the colony by inculcating in them the principles of European civilization and isolating them from the hostile influence of our neighbors.

— In a letter dated January 15, 1866, Paulin Vial, Directeur du Cabinet du Gouverneur de la Cochinchine

Since the 1920s, the Vietnamese mostly use chữ Quốc ngữ, and new Vietnamese terms for new items or words are often calqued from Hán Nôm. Some French had originally planned to replace Vietnamese with French, but this never was a serious project, given the small number of French settlers compared with the native population. The French had to reluctantly accept the use of chữ Quốc ngữ to write Vietnamese since this writing system, created by Portuguese missionaries, is based on Portuguese orthography, not French.

Mass education

Between 1907 and 1908, the short-lived Tonkin Free School promulgated chữ Quốc ngữ 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 chữ Quốc ngữ in primary school and then the French language (taught in chữ Quốc ngữ). Hundreds of thousands of textbooks for primary education began to be published in chữ Quốc ngữ, 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.