Chữ Quốc Ngữ: How Vietnamese Ended Up Written in Latin Letters

Last week I wrote about Hán-Việt, the Chinese-derived layer buried inside Vietnamese vocabulary. This week is about the strange thing on the surface: the letters themselves. Of the four countries that once shared Chinese characters as their language of learning — China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam — Vietnam is the only one that now writes in the Latin alphabet, decorated with more diacritics than almost any other writing system you will meet.

That alphabet is called chữ quốc ngữ, “the script of the national language”. The name sounds old and official. The script is neither as old as most people assume, nor did it start out national. For most of its life it was a minority script used by missionaries and Catholic communities, while educated Vietnamese wrote in Chinese characters (chữ Hán) and in chữ Nôm, the Vietnamese adaptation of them.

A Jesuit notebook in Hội An

The usual story credits one man: Alexandre de Rhodes, a Jesuit born in Avignon in 1593. His name is on the landmark book, the Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum — a Vietnamese–Portuguese–Latin dictionary printed in Rome in 1651, together with a catechism in Vietnamese. Those were the first printed works of any size in the romanised script, and Rhodes deserves real credit for them.

But Rhodes did not invent the system. He arrived in Cochinchina (Đàng Trong, the southern realm ruled by the Nguyễn lords) in 1624, and his teacher there was a Portuguese Jesuit, Francisco de Pina. Pina had reached Đàng Trong in 1617 and lived in Hội An. He is described as the first European to speak Vietnamese fluently; he compiled a first vocabulary around 1619 and wrote about Vietnamese orthography and phonetics in 1622–23. Before coming to Vietnam he studied in Macau, where Portuguese Jesuits had already been romanising Japanese — so he arrived with a working method. He drowned off Cửa Đại in December 1625 trying to rescue people from a wrecked ship, which is partly why his name faded and his student’s survived.

The French priest-linguist Roland Jacques, in Portuguese Pioneers of Vietnamese Linguistics (2002), made the case that Pina and other Portuguese Jesuits, including Gaspar do Amaral and António Barbosa, laid the foundations Rhodes built on. Not every scholar accepts all of his conclusions, but the general picture — a team effort, with Portuguese ears doing the early listening — is now widely accepted. Even Wikipedia’s Rhodes article says he “developed an early Vietnamese alphabet based on work by earlier Portuguese missionaries”.

You can still see the Portuguese

This matters for learners because the spelling still carries those 17th-century ears. Nh for the sound in nhà is the same digraph Portuguese uses in vinho. The rule that you write c before a, o, u but k before i, e, ê (ca, cô but kê, kì), and g but gh before i, e, ê (ga but ghế), reflects European spelling conventions designed so a missionary would pronounce the consonant correctly — not anything in the Vietnamese sounds.

The script also froze some sounds that later changed. Rhodes’s dictionary used a letter that no longer exists, ꞗ (a b with a flourish), for a sound somewhere between b and v; it is how vậy was written then (ꞗệy). By the early 19th century the sound had merged into v and the letter disappeared. And the plain letter d now sounds like z in Hà Nội and like y in Sài Gòn, while the “real” d sound is spelled đ. If you have ever wondered why d is not pronounced d, the answer is that spelling stands still while speech moves on — exactly why English writes knight.

From missionary tool to colonial policy

For two centuries quốc ngữ stayed inside the Church. What made it national was, uncomfortably, French colonialism. After France took Cochinchina in the 1860s, the administration promoted the Latin script: Gia Định báo, generally cited as the first newspaper in quốc ngữ, appeared in Saigon in the mid-1860s, and from the late 1860s to the early 1880s a series of regulations required quốc ngữ in official documents and schooling in the south. The motive was not generosity. A script French officials could learn in weeks was easier to administer with, and it cut the elite off from the Chinese-character world of the mandarins.

The old system ended in the north and centre a generation later. The traditional Confucian examinations, the road to office for nearly a thousand years, held their last sessions in 1915 in Tonkin and 1919 in Annam (Huế).

Then the Vietnamese took it back

What I find most interesting is what happened next. Vietnamese reformers realised that a script you could learn in months, not years, was a weapon. The Đông Kinh Nghĩa Thục (Tonkin Free School), opened in Hà Nội in 1907, taught in quốc ngữ to spread modern ideas; the French closed it within the year. In 1938 the Association for the Dissemination of Quốc Ngữ (Hội Truyền bá Quốc ngữ) was founded in Hà Nội to teach adults to read. Colonial education statistics from that period put illiteracy at about 95% of the population.

On 8 September 1945, days after declaring independence, the new government issued decrees creating the Popular Education service (Bình dân học vụ) to wipe out illiteracy. Within its first year, Vietnamese sources report around 75,000 literacy classes and more than 2.5 million people taught to read. That campaign, in quốc ngữ, is why the script is now simply “Vietnamese writing” — and why 8 September, which is also UNESCO’s International Literacy Day, is remembered in Vietnam as the anniversary of Bình dân học vụ.

What this means if you are learning to read Vietnamese

Trust the spelling more than you trust English spelling. Quốc ngữ was designed by people writing down what they heard, so it is far more regular than English. Once you know the values of the letters and the six tones, you can read aloud almost any word correctly — even if regional accents then reshape it.
Learn the c/k/q and g/gh/ng/ngh rules as spelling, not sounds. Ca and kê start with the same consonant; ga and ghế too. These are spelling-only distinctions inherited from European conventions.
Expect north–south mismatches. The spelling preserves distinctions some dialects have lost: d, gi and r are all a z-sound in Hà Nội but distinct elsewhere, and s/x or tr/ch merge in many northern accents. Spelling mistakes by native speakers tend to cluster exactly there.
Don’t skip the diacritics, even when typing. Without them, ma, má, mà, mả, mã, mạ collapse into one string. The marks are not decoration; they are half the information.

I learned to read in quốc ngữ without ever asking where it came from. Knowing that it began in a Jesuit’s notebook in Hội An, was imposed by a colonial government, and was then taken back by a literacy campaign makes every ơ and ư feel a bit like a historical document.

A Jesuit notebook in Hội An

You can still see the Portuguese

From missionary tool to colonial policy

Then the Vietnamese took it back

What this means if you are learning to read Vietnamese

Sources