Vietnamese alphabet

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Vietnamese alphabet" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (April 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

The Vietnamese alphabet (Vietnamese: chữ Quốc ngữ, lit. 'script of the National language') is the modern writing script for Vietnamese. It uses the Latin script based on Romance languages^[6] originally developed by Portuguese missionary Francisco de Pina (1585–1625).^[1]

The Vietnamese alphabet contains 29 letters, including seven letters using four diacritics: ⟨ă⟩, ⟨â⟩, ⟨ê⟩, ⟨ô⟩, ⟨ơ⟩, ⟨ư⟩, and ⟨đ⟩. There are an additional five diacritics used to designate tone (as in ⟨à⟩, ⟨á⟩, ⟨ả⟩, ⟨ã⟩, and ⟨ạ⟩). The complex vowel system and the large number of letters with diacritics, which can stack twice on the same letter (e.g. nhất meaning 'first'), makes it easy to distinguish the Vietnamese orthography from other writing systems that use the Latin script.^[7]

The Vietnamese system's use of diacritics produces an accurate transcription for tones despite the limitations of the Roman alphabet. On the other hand, sound changes in the spoken language have led to different letters, digraphs and trigraphs now representing the same sounds.