Vietnamese alphabet

The Vietnamese alphabet, called chữ quốc ngữ (script of the national language), usually shortened to quốc ngữ (national language), is the current writing system for the Vietnamese language. It is based on the Latin alphabet (more specifically the Portuguese alphabet) with some digraphs and the addition of nine accent marks or diacritics — four of them to create additional sounds, and the other five to indicate the tone of each word. The many diacritics, often two on the same letter, make written Vietnamese easily recognizable.

The letters

The Vietnamese alphabet has the following 29 letters, in collating order:

{| AĂÂBCDĐEÊGHIKLMNOÔƠPQRSTUƯVXY aăâbcdđeêghiklmnoôơpqrstuưvxy

Vietnamese also uses the 9 digraphs and 1 trigraph below.

CH GH GI KH NG NGH NH PH TH TR

These groups were formerly considered single letters and one can find them in older dictionaries. They are no longer considered single letters for collating and similar purposes; so, for example, "CH" will be collated between "CA" and "CO" in modern dictionaries.

The letters "F", "J", "W" and "Z" are not part of the Vietnamese alphabet, but are used in foreign loan words. "W" is sometimes used in place of "Ư" in abbreviations.

Vowels

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.

The letters y and i are mostly equivalent, and there is no rule that says when to use one or the other. There have been attempts since the early 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 part because some people bristled at the thought of names such as Nguyễn becoming Nguiễn and Thúy (a common female name) becoming Thúi (stinky), even though the standardization does not apply to diphthongs and triphthongs and allowed exceptions to proper names. Currently, the spelling that uses i exclusively is found only in scientific publications and textbooks. Most people and the popular media continue to use the spelling that they are most accustomed to.

Orthography	Sound value(s)	Orthography	Sound value(s)
a		o
ă		ô
â		ơ
e		u
ê		ư
i		y

The table below matches Vietnamese vowels (written in IPA) and their respective orthographic symbols used in the writing system.

usually written as i: = sĩ (A suffix indicating profession, similar to the English suffix -er).
sometimes written as y: = Mỹ 'America'.
always written as y if
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'.
(Note that i and y are also used to write the consonant semivowel .)

written as ê.

written as e.

written as ư.

written as ơ.

occurs as a monophthong and also as the second part of a diphthong.

written as a.

written as u.

written as ô.

written as o.

*Simple Vowels*

*Diphthongs & Triphthongs*
Sound Value(s)	Orthography	Orthography
Diphthongs
	ui	iu
	ôi	êu
	oi	eo
	ơi	ơu
	ây, ê	âu, ô
	ai	ao
	ay, a	au, o
	ưi	ưu
	ia, ya, iê, yê	ua, uô
	ưa, ươ
Triphthongs
	iêu, yêu	uôi
	ươi	ươu

written as ia in open syllables: /miɜ/ = mía 'sugar cane' (note: open syllables are syllables that end a vowel, closed syllables end in a consonant)
written as iê before a consonant: /miɜŋ/ = miếng 'piece'
the i is written as y at the beginning of words or after an orthographic vowel:
- ya: /xwiɜ/ = khuya 'late at night'
- yê: /xwiɜn/ = khuyên 'to advise'; /iɜn/ = yên 'calm'

written as ua in open syllables: /muɜ/ = mua 'to buy'
written as uô before a consonant: /muɜn/ = muôn 'ten thousand'

written as ưa in open syllables: /mɨɜ/ = mưa 'to rain'
written as ươ before consonants: /mɨɜŋ/ = mương 'irrigation canal'

Consonants

The digraph "GH" and the trigraph "NGH" are basically replacements for "G" and "NG" that are used before "I", in order to avoid confusion with the "GI" digraph. For historical reasons, they are also used before "E" or "Ê".

Most of the consonants are pronounced like their European equivalents, with the following clarifications:

"CH" is a voiceless palatal stop (IPA: ) or affricate (IPA: ).
"Đ" is similar to a "D" sound in many languages. Vietnamese "Đ", however, is additionally pronounced with a glottal stop immediately preceding or simultaneous with "Đ".
Both "D" and "GI" are pronounced either in the northern dialects (including Hanoi), or (similar to English "y") in the central and Saigon dialects.
"V" is pronounced in the northern dialects, or in the southern dialects.
"KH" is a voiceless velar fricative (IPA: ). It is similar to the German or Scottish "CH", Russian "X", Mandarin "H", Spanish "J", or Arabic and Persian "KH". It is never pronounced like English "K" or Hindi "KH" ख.
"NG" is a velar nasal (IPA: ). "NG" is similar to both occurrences of "ng" in English "singing". It is never pronounced like English "N" or "N" plus "G".
"NH" is a palatal nasal (IPA: ), similar to Polish "Ń", Spanish "Ñ", Portuguese "NH", or French and Italian "GN".
"PH" is pronounced , as in English "Philip". (Vietnamese "PH" is never pronounced like English "P" or Hindi "PH" फ.)
"S" is pronounced like the English "SH", and "X" is pronounced like English "SS" for the southern dialect and some central dialects; But they are both pronounced like English "SS" among the northern dialects.
"TH" is an aspirated "T" (IPA: ). It is similar to the "TH" थ sound in Hindi or the "T" sound in English when pronounced at the beginning of a word. It is never pronounced like the English "TH" or French/Spanish "T".
"TR" is a retroflex "T" (in the southern regions) and pronounced like the Vietnamese "CH" in the northern dialects. Its only other equivalent is in the Mandarin Chinese "ZH". Mandarin Chinese words that start with the "ZH" will usually turn into Sino-Vietnamese words that start with "TR".

Structure

Due to influence from the Chinese writing system, each word unit in Vietnamese consists of one syllable. A word consists of at most three parts, in the following order from left to right:

An optional beginning consonant part
A required vowel part and the tone mark, if needed, applied above or below it
An optional ending consonant part, can only be one of the following: c, ch, m, n, ng, nh, p, t.

Tone markings

Vietnamese is a tonal language, i.e. the meaning of each word depends on the "tone" (basically a specific pitch and glottalization pattern) in which it is pronounced. There are six distinct tones; the first one ("level tone") is not marked, and the other five are indicated by diacritics applied to the vowel part of the syllable.

Tone	Marking	Marked Vowels
Ngang (Level)	Unmarked	A/a	Ă/ă	Â/â	E/e	Ê/ê	I/i	O/o	Ô/ô	Ơ/ơ	U/u	Ư/ư	Y/y
Huyền (Falling)	Grave	À/à	Ằ/ằ	Ầ/ầ	È/è	Ề/ề	Ì/ì	Ò/ò	Ồ/ồ	Ờ/ờ	Ù/ù	Ừ/ừ	Ỳ/ỳ
Sắc (Rising)	Acute	Á/á	Ắ/ắ	Ấ/ấ	É/é	Ế/ế	Í/í	Ó/ó	Ố/ố	Ớ/ớ	Ú/ú	Ứ/ứ	Ý/ý
Hỏi (Dipping-rising)	Hook	Ả/ả	Ẳ/ẳ	Ẩ/ẩ	Ẻ/ẻ	Ể/ể	Ỉ/ỉ	Ỏ/ỏ	Ổ/ổ	Ở/ở	Ủ/ủ	Ử/ử	Ỷ/ỷ
Ngã (Rising glottalized)	Tilde	Ã/ã	Ẵ/ẵ	Ẫ/ẫ	Ẽ/ẽ	Ễ/ễ	Ĩ/ĩ	Õ/õ	Ỗ/ỗ	Ỡ/ỡ	Ũ/ũ	Ữ/ữ	Ỹ/ỹ
Nặng (Falling glottalized)	Dot below	Ạ/ạ	Ặ/ặ	Ậ/ậ	Ẹ/ẹ	Ệ/ệ	Ị/ị	Ọ/ọ	Ộ/ộ	Ợ/ợ	Ụ/ụ	Ự/ự	Ỵ/ỵ

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 doesn't exist, as in hóa), the "new style" emphasizes linguistic principles and tries to apply the tone mark on the main vowel (as in hoá). 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 digraph, 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 new documents, while some people still prefer the old style.

The lowercase letter "i" should retain its dot even when accented. (However, this detail is often lost in computers and on the Internet, due to the obscurity of Vietnamese specialty fonts and limitations of encoding systems.)

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.

History

The Vietnamese language was first written down, from the 13th century onwards, using variant Chinese characters (chữ nôm 字喃), each of them representing one word. The system was based on the script used for writing classical Chinese (chữ nho), but it was supplemented with characters developed in Vietnam (chữ thuần nôm, proper Nom characters) to represent native Vietnamese words.

As early as 1527, Portuguese Christian missionaries in Vietnam began using the Latin alphabet to transcribe the Vietnamese language for teaching and evangalization purposes. These informal efforts led eventually to the development of the present Vietnamese alphabet, largely by the work of French Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes, who worked in the country between 1624 and 1644. Building on previous Portuguese-Vietnamese dictionaries by Gaspar D'Amaral and Duarte da Costa, Rhodes wrote a Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin dictionary, which was printed in Rome in 1651, using his spelling system.

In spite of this development, chữ nôm and chữ nho remained in use until the early 20th century, when the French colonial administration made Rhodes's alphabet official. By the late 20th century, quốc ngữ was universally used to write Vietnamese, such that literacy in the previous Chinese character-based writing systems for Vietnamese is now limited to a small number of scholars and specialists.

Because the period of education necessary to gain initial literacy is considerably less for the largely phonetic Latin-based script compared to the several years necessary to master the full range of Chinese characters, the adoption of the Vietnamese alphabet also facilitated widespread literacy among Vietnamese speakers—in fact, whereas a majority of Vietnamese in Vietnam could not read or write prior to the 20th century, the population is now almost universally literate.

Sino-Vietnamese and quốc ngữ

Writing Sino-Vietnamese words with quốc ngữ had caused some confusions about the origins of some terms, due to the large amount of homophones in Chinese and Sino-Vietnamese. For example, both 明 (bright) and 冥 (dark) are read as minh, thus the word "minh" has two contradictory meanings: bright and dark (although the "dark" meaning is now esoteric and is used in only a few compound words). Perhaps for this reason, the Vietnamese name for Pluto isn't Minh Vương Tinh (冥王星 - lit. underworld king star) as in other East Asian languages, but is Diêm Vương Tinh (閻王星), named after the Buddhist deity Yama. During the Ho Dynasty, Vietnam was officially known as Đại Ngu (大虞 - Great Yu). Unfortunately, most modern Vietnamese know ngu as "stupid" (愚), consequently some misinterpret it as "Big Idiot". However, the homograph/homophone problem is not as serious as it appears, because although many Sino-Vietnamese words have multiple meanings when written with quốc ngữ, usually only one has widespread usage, while the others are relegated to obscurity. Furthermore, Sino-Vietnamese words are usually not used alone, but in compound words, thus the meaning of the compound word is preserved even if individually each has multiple meanings. Most importantly, since quốc ngữ is an exact phonetic transcription of the spoken language, its understandability is as high or higher than a normal conversation.

Computer support

The universal character set Unicode does not have a separate segment for the Vietnamese alphabet; the required characters are scattered throughout the Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B, and Latin Extended Additional segments. An ASCII-based writing convention, Vietnamese Quoted Readable, and several byte-based encodings including TCVN3, VNI, and VISCII 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. Due to the nonstandard way combining characters are implemented in various operating systems, 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 utilities that act as keyboard drivers exist. They support the most popular input methods, including Telex, VIQR and its variants, and VNI.

External links

Scanned version of Alexandre de Rhodes' dictionary
Vietnamese Writing System
Essay comparing the orthography variants
Vietnamese Unicode FAQs
Doctoral dissertation comparing learning efficiency between quoc ngu and Chinese characters
Chữ viết (in Vietnamese)
The right place of the Vietnamese accent a simple rule for learners, on where to put the tonal accent
The Vietnamese keyboard its layout is compared with US, UK, Canada, France, and Germany's keyboards.

Bibliography

Gregerson, Kenneth J. (1969). A study of Middle Vietnamese phonology. Bulletin de la Société des Etudes Indochinoises, 44, 135-193. (Published version of the author's MA thesis, University of Washington). (Reprinted 1981, Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics).
Haudricourt, André-Georges. (1949). Origine des particularités de l'alphabet vietnamien. Dân Việt-Nam, 3, 61-68.
Nguyen, Đang Liêm. (1970). Vietnamese pronunciation. PALI language texts: Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8702-2462-X
Nguyễn, Đình-Hoà. (1955). Quốc-ngữ: The modern writing system in Vietnam. Washington, D. C.: Author.
Nguyễn, Đình-Hoà. (1992). Vietnamese phonology and graphemic borrowings from Chinese: The Book of 3,000 Characters revisited. Mon-Khmer Studies, 20'', 163-182.
Nguyễn, Đình-Hoà. (1996). Vietnamese. In P. T. Daniels, & W. Bright (Eds.), The world's writing systems, (pp. 691-699). New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-507993-0.
Nguyễn, Đình-Hoà. (1997). Vietnamese: Tiếng Việt không son phấn. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. ISBN 1-55619-733-0.
Pham, Andrea Hoa. (2003). Vietnamese tone: A new analysis. Outstanding dissertations in linguistics. New York: Routledge. (Published version of author's 2001 PhD dissertation, University of Florida: Hoa, Pham. Vietnamese tone: Tone is not pitch). ISBN 0-4159-6762-7.
Thompson, Laurence E. (1991). A Vietnamese reference grammar. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-1117-8. (Original work published 1965).

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