History of writing in Vietnam

Terminology

In Vietnamese, Chinese characters are called chữ Hán (字漢 ‘Han characters’), Hán tự (漢字 ‘Han characters’), Hán văn (漢文 ‘Han characters’), or chữ nho (字儒 ‘Confucian characters’). 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.

Hán Nôm (漢喃 ‘Han and chữ Nôm characters’) may mean either both Hán and Nôm taken together, as in the research remit of Hanoi's Hán-Nôm Institute, or refer to texts which are written in a mixture of Hán and Nôm, or refer to some Hán texts with parallel Nôm translations. There is a significant orthographic overlap between Hán and Nôm and many characters are used in both Hán and Nôm with the same reading.

The term chữ quốc ngữ (字國語 "national language script") means Vietnamese written in romanised script.

Chinese domination

No writings in Chinese by Vietnamese writers survive from the Chinese domination period.

Imperial Vietnam

In Imperial Vietnam (939-1919), formal writings were, in most cases, done in classical Chinese. This was true both of the language of government and administration, and also of entry into government and administration by the wholly Chinese-language Confucian examination system in Vietnam. Chinese was also the language of medicine, astrology, religion, science and high literature such as poetry. Vietnamese existed only as an oral language, before the creation of the nom script to preserve and circulate less serious poetry and narrative literature. These writings are indistinguishable from contemporaneous classical Chinese works produced in China, Korea, or Japan as are the first poems in chữ nho by the monk Khuông Việt and the Nam Quốc Sơn Hà by general Lý Thường Kiệt.

Localisation and Sino-xenic pronunciation

In Vietnam classical Chinese texts was read with the vocalization of Chinese text as such, equivalent to the Chinese On-readings in Japanese kambun (漢文), or the assimilated vocalizations in Korean hanmun (한문). This occurring alongside entry of Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary into the vernacular Vietnamese language. And creating, in Samuel Martin's term, a Sinoxenic dialect. The Sinologist Edwin G. Pulleyblank was the one of the first linguists to actively employ "Sino-Vietnamese" to recover the earlier history of Chinese.

Period of coexistence of two languages and two scripts

From the 13th Century the dominance of Chinese writing - chữ nho - began to be challenged by a system of modified and invented characters modeled loosely on Chinese characters called chữ nôm, which, unlike the system of chữ nho (or chữ Hán), allowed for the expression of purely Vietnamese words, was created in Vietnam at least as early as the 13th century. During the Ming dynasty occupation of Vietnam chữ nôm printing blocks, texts and inscriptions were destroyed, so that the earliest surviving texts are from after the period. While designed for native Vietnamese speakers, chữ nôm required the user to have a fair knowledge of chữ Hán, and thus chữ nôm was used primarily for literary writings by cultural elites (such as the poetry of Nguyễn Du and Hồ Xuân Hương), while almost all other official writings and documents continued to be written in classical Chinese until the 20th century.

French colonial period

The use of classical Chinese, and its written form, chữ nho (or chữ Hán), died out in Vietnam early in the 20th century during the middle years of French Indochina. At this time there were briefly four competing writing systems in Vietnam; chữ nho, chữ nôm, quốc ngữ, and French. Although the first romanized script quốc ngữ newspaper, Gia Dinh Bao, was founded in 1865, Vietnamese nationalists continued to use chữ nôm until after the First World War when quốc ngữ became the favoured language of the Vietnamese independence movement. Some scholars still study it today although its application is mostly confined to the historic context of Vietnamese texts.

Usage today

Individual Hán tự are still written by calligraphers for special occasions such as the Vietnamese New Year, Tết.

Use of quốc ngữ for education in both North and South Vietnam from 1945-1975, and then all of Vietnam since 1975, has rendered most Vietnamese unable to read earlier Vietnamese texts, whether written in Chinese chữ nho, or vernacular chữ nôm. Hán Nôm Institute is the national centre for academic research into both Hán and nôm texts. Since the mid-1990s a small resurgence in teaching of Chinese characters, both for chữ nho and the additional characters used in chữ nôm, to enable the study of Vietnam's history has emerged. Additionally many Vietnamese study Hán tự characters as part of learning modern Japanese and Chinese; in some cases it is also studied as part of learning Korean as a study tool for learning Korean etymology. The significance of the characters has occasionally entered Western depiction of Vietnam; for instance novelist E. M. Nathanson mentions the characters in A Dirty Distant War (1987).

For linguists the Sino-Vietnamese readings of Chinese characters provide data for the study of historical Chinese phonology.