Why is Vietnamese written in Latin script?

A person arrives in Hanoi , walks past the same signs for a month, and one day catches himself reading them. He doesn't understand them, but he reads them: cơm , phở , nhà thuốc , cấm . In Bangkok or Phnom Penh, this would take months, not weeks: there, he'd have to learn the entire foreign alphabet first. Vietnam is the only country in mainland Southeast Asia where visitors get this advantage for free, and it wasn't created for the convenience of tourists.

Behind the Latin letters on the quán cơm sign lies a thousand-year-long chain: Chinese characters in chanceries, Portuguese missionaries with dictionaries, a colonial decree conceived as a weapon against the educated class—and a reversal in which this weapon was turned against the one who forged it.

"Hieroglyphs from the Neighbors" is a myth that lives longer than the hieroglyphs themselves.

Let's start with something that disrupts the conventional wisdom: Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos don't use hieroglyphs or anything that came from China. The Thai, Khmer, and Lao scripts are descendants of the Indian Brahmi alphabet, which arrived here via South Indian scripts. They arrived not with officials from China, but with Buddhism and Hinduism, along with monks and sacred texts.

This changes the entire perspective. Southeast Asia is divided not into "countries with hieroglyphs" and Vietnam, but into two cultural basins: the Indian and the Chinese, of which Vietnam is alone. And only Vietnam emerged from this basin, changing its writing system entirely.

The Khmer script is the oldest of the three. According to the Book of Records, it holds the record for the most characters among all alphabets; this should be viewed as a record, not a strict linguistic classification. The Thai script, according to the traditional version, dates back to the late 13th century—a generally accepted date, but one that has its detractors, and the debate is not closed.

And there's a detail that tourists discover once they're there: there are no spaces between words in Thai and Khmer. Even after learning the signs, you're faced with the next challenge: figuring out where one word ends and the next begins. A Vietnamese line is broken into short syllables with spaces, and the eye is drawn to them from day one.

A thousand years of hieroglyphs and the paradox of chữ Nôm

For about a thousand years, the written language of the Vietnamese administration was Chữ Hán —Classical Chinese. It was used for document management, exams, and chronicles. Spoken Vietnamese existed separately and rarely appeared on paper.

Since the 13th century, a distinct script— chữ Nôm— has developed : Vietnamese words were written using modified and composite Chinese characters. The logic is clear: if there's a distinct language, there must be a distinct way to write it.

And here lies the main paradox of the entire story. Their own script turned out to be more difficult than the foreign one. To read Nôm , one had to first learn Chinese, and then, on top of that, a Vietnamese superstructure of new characters. The national script required knowledge of two systems instead of one. Literacy remained the privilege of Mandarin officials and could become nothing more.

Moreover, it was in Chữ Nôm that "The Tale of Kiệu" ( Truyện Kiều ), the most important poem of Vietnamese literature, was written. A system doomed to remain the preserve of hundreds of people managed to produce a text known throughout the country.

The Portuguese, the Jesuits, and the 1651 Dictionary

The Latin alphabet appeared in Vietnam not as a reform, but as a working tool. In the 17th century, Portuguese missionaries began writing Vietnamese in Latin letters for one reason: to learn it. They needed to preach, which meant speaking, which meant somehow recording what they heard.

The first European to speak Vietnamese fluently was the Portuguese Francisco de Pina. For readers in Da Nang, this story has a local context: de Pina died in a shipwreck in Da Nang Bay in 1625—in the very waters that are viewed from the waterfront today.

His student was the Jesuit from Avignon, Alexandre de Rhodes. In 1651, he published the first Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin dictionary in Rome— Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum . The system's structure has remained fundamentally unchanged since then: Latin letters plus diacritics that convey six tones.

Now comes a story that deserves to be stated frankly. De Roda is commonly called the creator of Vietnamese writing, but this is historically inaccurate. He himself stated in the preface that he relied on the works of the Portuguese Gaspar do Amaral and António Barbosa. The credit goes to one—the one whose book was published in Rome. We would say this: he is not the author of the system, but its publisher and systematizer.

250 years of oblivion and the decree of 1882

Here history pauses for almost two and a half centuries. The dictionary was published, the system worked—and remained an internal church tool. It was used by missionaries and converts; the Vietnamese administration continued to write in hieroglyphs, and there was no sign of change.

The turning point came in January 1882: a colonial decree made the use of Latin script mandatory in the administration. The stated goal wasn't educational. The Latin script was intended to weaken the educated class—those who read Chinese and opposed French rule.

The mechanics of the plan are simple and quite cruel: cut the population off from a thousand-year-old body of texts and, at the same time, from the elite who possessed it. Not to teach them to read, but to make it so that no one can read the old texts.

Reversal: How a Colonial Instrument Became National

The plan backfired. Vietnamese nationalists were the first to master arithmetic: mastering Chinese took about three months, compared to the many years it took to learn Chinese characters. A written language mastered in a single summer isn't a tool of oppression. It's a tool for mass literacy.

Everything moved quickly from there. Newspapers, schools, leaflets, and the anti-colonialist movement—everything requiring rapid circulation and a readership that didn't require ten years of training—were all propelled by the Latin alphabet. After 1945, nationwide literacy campaigns were launched using the same alphabet.

Since then, attitudes toward de Roda have fluctuated with the times. A monument to him was erected in Hanoi in 1940, as the "creator of the national script." Around 1956, the monument was removed. In recent years, there has been debate about its return, and it is perhaps the most honest monument to history itself: the country is still deciding whether to consider the Latin alphabet a gift, a trophy, or its own invention.

Timeline: Key Dates

What does this story give you in practice today?

The benefits are tangible and come sooner than any knowledge of the language. You don't understand Vietnamese, but you can work with it with your eyes and hands because you've been familiar with all the symbols since first grade.

• Signs and menus cease to be ornamental: you begin to distinguish a rice joint from a noodle shop, and a vegetarian one from a meat one.
• The street name from the sign can be copied into a messenger or maps without "copying" unfamiliar signs
• The address entered into the taxi app is typed using a regular keyboard - the only issue is the diacritics.
• A pharmacy, a hospital, and a prohibitory sign are identified by a single word, not a picture.
• Any search query, any contract, any certificate looks like text, not like a wall of symbols.

Mini-dictionary of signs and menus

Twenty words that cover most street signs. The transcription here is approximate—it's needed to recognize the word, not to pronounce it correctly; we'll discuss the differences below.

Fair disclaimer: reading is not the same as speaking

Vietnamese is not an easy language. It's easy to read and difficult to pronounce, and those two things are about as far apart as they can get.

The reason is diacritics. The marks above and below the letters are not decoration or a "French heritage": they convey six tones. The same letter combination with different marks means different words with different meanings. The eye distinguishes them instantly; the throat and ear, far more so.

Hence the typical scene: a visitor confidently reads a sign out loud—and no one understands him. There's nothing unusual here. Latin gave you access to text, but not speech; these are two different skills, and the second will have to be developed separately, preferably with a native speaker.

Frequent Questions

Is it true that Vietnamese is easier than Thai?

For reading, yes, and it's noticeable: the letters are already familiar, and words are separated by spaces, which are absent in neither Thai nor Khmer. There's no such advantage for speech: the tonal system remains tonal regardless of the letters used to write it.

Is it possible to write without diacritics?

Undesirable. Diacritics convey tone, and tone differentiates words: by removing the marks, you're removing part of the meaning. In correspondence, Vietnamese people sometimes understand each other based on context, but in addresses, the name of establishments, or documents, it's better to keep the marks.

Will knowing English help?

With letters, yes, you recognize them effortlessly. With reading aloud, almost no effort: Vietnamese has its own letter-sound correspondence, and English habits are more likely to get in the way.

How long does it take to read a menu?

Recognizing the words in the table above is a matter of a few weeks of normal city life, without classes. The historical benchmark for the entire system is another figure: mastering quốc ngữ took about three months—versus the many years it took to learn hieroglyphs.

Who actually invented quốc ngữ?

Not just one person. The system was developed by Portuguese missionaries of the 17th century, including Francisco de Pina, Gaspar do Amaral, and António Barbosa. Alexandre de Rhode compiled these findings into a 1651 dictionary and acknowledged his predecessors in the preface—but in the public consciousness, he remained the sole author.

Did the French introduce the Latin alphabet to help the Vietnamese?

No. The stated goal of the 1882 decree was to weaken the educated class, which read Chinese and opposed colonial rule. Mass literacy was a consequence, not an intention, and it arose through the efforts of those against whom the decree was directed.

So, Vietnamese is an easy language?

No. The only thing that makes it easy is the entrance: you read earlier than in neighboring countries. Then the six tones begin, and here Vietnamese is no easier than any other tonal language.

What remains

A month in Da Nang won't make you speak. But you'll start reading—and that's no small thing, it's a rare instance when someone else's centuries-old history works to your advantage.

The "Quán Cơm" sign on the corner is the end point of a long chain: a thousand years of Chinese characters, a Portuguese priest who drowned in a local bay, a dictionary published in Rome, a decree intended as a blow to the educated, and the generation that intercepted it and returned it to its sender. The Latin alphabet here isn't a simplification or a concession to tourists. It's a trophy—and your use of it is part of the story.