The romanised writing of Vietnamese: a unique case in the Far East

Historical circumstances have left the Vietnamese language with a legacy of three written systems: sinograms, introduced at the same time as the Chinese Empire’s political control and the classical Confucian books; the nôm script, sinograms adapted to the Vietnamese language; and Romanized writing, created by Jesuit missionaries, which has had oBC Dcial status since 1945. The Vietnamese use of a Latin-type alphabet is a unique phenomenon among countries marked by Confucian doctrine in the East Asian cultural sphere. In this chapter, we retrace the creation of the Romanized writing ([chữ] quốc ngữ) since 1615 and its subsequent evolution. We analyze the historical and literary context and the opinions of the relevant C Dgures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to show the extent to which quốc ngữ has occupied the role of the official script of Vietnam.