Blackwell Reference Online

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Contemporary Vietnamese is written with an alphabetic writing system using Roman letters. First attempts at designing an alphabetic orthography for Vietnamese were made by Portuguese, French and Italian missionaries in the seventeenth century. The earliest alphabetically written dictionary of the language was published in 1651 under the auspices of the Vatican in Rome, the trilingual Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin Dictionarium Annamiticum - Lusitanum et Latinum by Alexandre de Rhodes. At the time, Vietnamese was usually written in a Chinese-derived script known as Chũ'nǒcm or ‘southern [i.e. Vietnamese] script, a highly intricate system which, however, was a significant symbol of Vietnamese identity. The inroads of alphabetic writing in Vietnamese literacy were therefore slow, and it was not until 1910 that the Roman alphabet was recognized as the official Vietnamese script.The orthography is based on the conventions developed by Alexandre de Rhodes. The Vietnamese alphabet consists of 37 letters (table 5), including complex graphemes such as digraphs and graphemes composed of a basic Roman letter and an additional mark, for instance the barred D <Đ> and the A with a breve sign <A> for [ā], a V which is further back than [a] = <a>. The letters F, J, W, and Z are not used, except in foreign proper names. In addition to the 37 letters, six superscript and subscript ... log in or subscribe to read full text