Qúoc Ngú: A New Dimension for the Roman Alphabet

Vietnam was the only country of southeast Asia more influenced by China than by India, having been a province of China for over 1000 years. Only Chinese was written until, in the ninth century A.D., some Vietnamese wanted to write their literature in their own language. They adapted Chinese characters to Vietnamese, but in a haphazard way.

Nevertheless, this writing, called Nôm, or Chú Nôm, "script of the spoken language," was a way to write their own language.

Europeans began coming to Vietnam in the sixteenth century. To learn Vietnamese, they tried writing it in Roman alphabets.

Above: Father Alexandre de Rhodes of Vietnam.

A French Jesuit missionary, Alexandre de Rhodes, took these efforts and developed an efficient Roman-type alphabet for Vietnamese. Long before the days of descriptive linguistics, de Rhodes was aware of the prime importance of tone in the speech of these people.

At the turn of the twentieth century, there were four writing systems in use in Vietnam: Chinese, Nôm, French, and de Rhodes'.

In the 1940s, there was a drive toward independence and literacy for everyone in the Vietnamese language. Only the de Rhodes alphabet, called Qúoc Ngú, "national script," was found suitable. Today nearly all speakers of Vietnamese are literate in Qúoc Ngú.

Vietnamese Alphabet

Qúoc Ngú: A New Dimension for the Roman Alphabet