History of writing in Vietnam

Until the beginning of the 20th century, government and scholarly documents in Vietnam were written in classical Chinese (Vietnamese: cổ văn 古文 or văn ngôn 文言), using Chinese characters with Vietnamese approximation of Middle Chinese pronunciations.

At the same time popular novels and poetry in Vietnamese were written in the chữ nôm script, which used Chinese characters for Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and an adapted set of characters for the native vocabulary.

The two scripts coexisted until the era of French Indochina when the Latin alphabet quốc ngữ script gradually became the written medium of both government and popular literature.

In Vietnamese, Chinese characters are called chữ Hán (字漢 'words from Han dynasty’), Hán tự (漢字 ‘Han characters/words’), Hán văn (漢文 ‘Han script’), or chữ nho (字儒 ‘words of Confucians’).Hán văn (漢文) also means Chinese language literature (in this case, Hán văn literally means ‘Han literature’).

The Vietnamese word chữ (character, script, writing, letter) is derived from the Old Chinese word 字, meaning ‘character’.

Sino-Vietnamese (Vietnamese: từ Hán Việt 詞漢越 ‘Sino-Vietnamese words’) is a term which is used by modern scholars in relation to Vietnam's Chinese-language texts to emphasise local characteristics and particularly the phonology of the Chinese written in Vietnam, though in regard to syntax and vocabulary this Sino-Vietnamese was no more different from Chinese used in Beijing than medieval English Latin was different from the Latin of Rome.

The term chữ Nôm (字喃 ‘Southern characters’) refers to the former transcription system for vernacular Vietnamese-language texts, written using a mixture of original Chinese characters and locally coined nôm characters not found in Chinese to phonetically represent Vietnamese sounds." However the character set for chữ nôm is extensive, up to 20,000, and both arbitrary in composition and inconsistent in pronunciation.

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