Tai Dam: Three Alphabets for One Language

Scattered to the four winds, different groups of the Tai Dam of Vietnam have become literate in different alphabets.

To begin with, they have their own Indic-type alphabet, the 1300-year old Tai Dam alphabet, of which they are proud. One man arriving in Iowa requested: "Mr. President, please do not make us give up our alphabet."

In other parts of Vietnam, children learned the Vietnamese type of Roman alphabet. Others learned the Laotian alphabet in Laos. Some went to France and the U.S., lands which use the Roman alphabet.

SIL linguists, making books in the Tai Dam language, use all three alphabets to accommodate the different backgrounds: Tai Dam, Lao, and Roman. Computer technology is used for typesetting. The Vietnamese-Roman is typed in and the computer automatically transliterates in the other two.

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Related Information

See the Tai Dam script.