Vietnamese

Vietnamese is the principal language of the Vietic branch of the Austroasiatic family, native to the Red River delta and carried southward as the Viet polities expanded. It is a tonal, isolating language with a large Sino-Vietnamese layer borrowed during Chinese rule. Old Vietnamese had separated from Muong by about the ninth century.

Literary Chinese served court and scholarship, while from around the thirteenth century scholars developed chu Nom to record the vernacular. Nom literature flowered in the poetry of Ho Xuan Huong and Nguyen Du's The Tale of Kieu, though the script won official standing only under the Ho and Tay Son regimes.

In 1651 the Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes published his Annamite-Portuguese-Latin dictionary, which fixed the romanised quoc ngu alphabet. In this period it remained largely confined to Christian texts, while Nom and Chinese characters dominated literary and official writing.