Vietnam - Culture
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Language and Writing
Vietnamese, pronounced tiếng Việt, or less commonly called Việt ngữ, was originally written in Chinese characters which were brought into Vietnam by the Chinese during the first occupation period. The Chinese characters were adopted by the Vietnamese and modified to form a written system called chu nom. The name for this writing system derived from the Vietnamese name for classical Chinese, chu nho. In 1651, a French monk, Alexandre du Rhodes, published a phonetic dictionary of Vietnamese sounds using Latin alphabetic characters. He called the written form Annamese, after the French name for Vietnam, Annam. This system is still used in Vietnam today, and is called quoc ngu (Quốc Ngữ). Quoc ngu has 29 letters, seven of which are modified by diacritics to produce sounds native to Vietnamese but not commonly found in Latin-based or Roman languages. Today, quoc ngu also includes words loaned from French, English, and even Japanese, which are modified to be pronounced in Vietnamese.
As a trade crossroads between East and South Asia, Vietnam has had an extremely diverse linguistic history. For much of it, Chinese was the official language, though many Vietnamese merchants in the bustling commercial ports learned to speak other languages such as Dutch, Malay, Khmer, Thai, Japanese and Hindi in order to conduct business and become more prosperous in trade. During the colonial period, many upper-class Vietnamese learned to speak French, which was the official language in both schools and the government. However, since the end of colonial rule and the Vietnam War, many Vietnamese have chosen instead to study English as a second language. Many ethnic groups have also retained their own indigenous languages, thus further diversifying Vietnam’s linguistic heritage.
An excellent, comprehensive account of the Vietnamese language:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_language
A very good website on quoc ngu and it’s Chinese predecessors:
http://www.cjvlang.com/Writing/writviet.html
Another good site which details the alphabet of quoc ngu:
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/vietnamese.htm
An excellent article about foreign-language learning in modern Vietnam:
http://www.languages.ait.ac.th/hanoi_proceedings/canh.htm
