Vietnamese alphabet


The Vietnamese alphabet Quốc ngữ; literally "National language is the modern writing system for the Vietnamese language. It uses the Latin script based on Romance languages, in particular, the Portuguese alphabet, with some digraphs and the addition of nine accent marks or diacritics – four of them to create sounds, and the other five to indicate tone. These many diacritics, often two on the same vowel, make written Vietnamese recognizable among localized variants of Latin alphabets.

Letter names and pronunciation

There are 29 letters in the Vietnamese alphabet. There are four to six tones, which are marked in the IPA as suprasegmentals following the phonemic value. It uses all the letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet except for F, J, W, and Z. The aforementioned letters are only used to write loanwords, languages of other ethnic groups in the country based on vietnamese phonetics to differentiate the meanings or even vietnamese dialects, for example: dz or z for southerner pronunciation of v in standard vietnamese.
Note:
The alphabet is largely derived from the Portuguese, although the usage of gh and gi was borrowed from Italian, and that for c/k/qu from Greek and Latin, mirroring the English usage of these letters.

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.
The letters y and i 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 is read while tai. There have been attempts since the late 20th century to standardize the orthography by replacing all the vowel uses of y with i, 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, y is used to represent only in Sino-Vietnamese words that are written with one letter y alone, at the beginning of a syllable when followed by ê, 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.
SpellingSound
a except as below
in au and ay
before syllable-final nh and ch, see
Vietnamese phonology#Analysis of final ch, nh
in ưa, ia and ya
in ua except after q
ă
â
e
ê except as below
before syllable-final nh and ch, see
Vietnamese phonology#Analysis of final ch, nh
in iê and yê
i except as below
after any vowel letter
o except as below
before ng and c
after any vowel letter
before any vowel letter except i
ô except as below
before ng and c except after a u that is not preceded by a q
in uô except after q
ơ except as below
in ươ
u except as below
after q or any vowel letter
before any vowel letter except a, ô and i
Before a, ô and i: if preceded by q, otherwise
ư
y except as below
after any vowel letter except u

The uses of the letters i and y to represent the phoneme can be categorized as "standard" 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 matches the vowels of Hanoi Vietnamese and their respective orthographic symbols used in the writing system.
Notes:
Notes:
The glide is written:
The off-glide is written as i except after â and ă, where it is written as y; note that is written as ay instead of *ăy .
The diphthong is written:
The diphthong is written:
The diphthong is written:
Vietnamese is a tonal language, i.e., the meaning of each word depends on the "tone" in which it is pronounced. There are six distinct tones in the standard northern dialect. In the south, there is a merging of the hỏi and ngã tones, in effect leaving five basic tones. The first one 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 syllables where the vowel part consists of more than one vowel, 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, the "new style" emphasizes linguistic principles and tries to apply the tone mark on the main vowel. 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. 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. 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.

Structure

As a result of influence from the Chinese writing system, each syllable in Vietnamese is written separately as if it were a word. 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 Triệu dynasty in the 2nd century BC, Vietnamese literature, government papers, scholarly works, and religious scripture were all written in classical Chinese. Since the 12th century, several Vietnamese words started to be written in chữ Nôm, using variant Chinese characters, each of them representing one word. The system was based off chu Han, but was also supplemented with Vietnamese-invented characters to represent native Vietnamese words.

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 Antonio Barbosa, Rhodes wrote 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. Still, chữ Nôm remained the dominant script in Vietnamese Catholic literature until late 19th century.

Colonial Times

In 1910, French colonial administration enforced chữ Quốc ngữ. The Latin alphabet became a means to publish Vietnamese popular literature, which were 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. Nowadays, although the Vietnamese majorly use chữ Quốc ngữ, new Vietnamese terms for new items or words are often claqued 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 is based on Portuguese orthography by Portugese missionaries, not by the French.

Mass education

Between 1907-1908 the short-lived Tonkin Free School promulgated quốc ngữ and taught French to the general population.
By 1917, the French had 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. Emperor Khải Định declared the traditional writing system abolished in 1918.
While the most traditional nationalists favoured the Confucian examination system and the use of ideograms, Vietnamese revolutionaries and progressive nationalists as well as pro-French elites viewed the French education system as a means to liberate the Vietnamese from old Chinese domination, to democratize education and to link the Vietnamese to ideals expressed by the French republic.
The French colonial regime then set up another educational system, teaching Vietnamese as first language using quoc ngu in primary school, and then French as a second language. Hundreds of thousands of textbooks for primary education began to be published in quoc ngu, with the unintentional result of turning the script into the popular medium for the expression of Vietnamese culture.

Late 20th century to present

Prior to the advent of 21st-century computer-assisted typesetting methods, the act of typesetting and printing Vietnamese has been described as a "nightmare" due to the number of accents and diacritics. Contemporary Vietnamese texts sometimes included words which have not been adapted to modern Vietnamese orthography, especially for documents written in Chinese characters. The Vietnamese language itself has been likened to a system akin to "ruby characters" elsewhere in Asia. See Vietnamese language and computers for usage on computers and on the internet.

Typing Vietnamese (computer support)

The universal character set Unicode has full support for the 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 are placed in the Latin Extended Additional block. An ASCII-based writing convention, Vietnamese Quoted Readable, and several byte-based encodings including VSCII, 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, most people use precomposed characters when composing Vietnamese-language documents.
Most keyboards used by Vietnamese-language users do not support direct input of diacritics by default. Various free software such as Unikey that act as keyboard drivers exist. They support the most popular input methods, including Telex, VNI, VIQR and its variants.