Vietnamese Letters & Accents

Vietnamese is written in chữ Quốc ngữ, "the national language script", a Latin alphabet of 29 letters in this order: a ă â b c d đ e ê g h i k l m n o ô ơ p q r s t u ư v x y. The standard alphabet has no f, j, w or z, though they also appear in Vietnamese writing outside the standard alphabet. Seven letters are Vietnamese additions to the Latin ones: ă with a breve, â ê ô with a circumflex, ơ ư with a little horn, and đ with a bar through it.

On top of those, every syllable carries one of six tones, and five of them are written with a mark on the vowel. That is why the tables above run to 178 letters: each of the 12 vowels a ă â e ê i o ô ơ u ư y comes plain and with five tone marks, 72 forms in all, and with the 17 consonants that makes 89, each in capital and small. A letter can carry two marks at once, one for the vowel and one for the tone, as ệ in Việt or ữ in chữ.

Vietnamese text places spaces between syllables, which is why place names look like Hà Nội, Đà Nẵng and Sài Gòn, and why the country is Việt Nam in Vietnamese.

Vietnamese accent marks and tone marks explained

The vowel marks change the vowel itself. Plain a is open, as in father; ă is the same sound made short, and â is a short, more closed vowel. ê and ô are closed e and o, while ơ and ư are said with unrounded lips, ơ close to the vowel of English "sir" and ư like a u said with spread lips. đ is a voiced alveolar implosive /ɗ/, while plain d is said like z in the north and like y in the south.

The tone marks change the pitch of the syllable and with it the word. With no mark, ngang is a level tone. The grave accent, huyền, is low and falling: à. The hook above, hỏi, dips and rises: ả. The tilde, ngã, rises with a break in the voice: ã. The acute accent, sắc, rises sharply: á. The dot below, nặng, is low and heavy: ạ. In much of the south hỏi and ngã sound alike, but they are still spelled apart.

Leaving the marks out turns words into others. The classic set is ma (ghost), mà (but), mả (grave), mã (horse, code), má (mother, cheek) and mạ (rice seedling). Vietnamese readers can usually guess unaccented text from context, but it looks careless in anything formal, and names lose their meaning: Nguyễn, Trần, Lê and Phạm all need their marks.

How to type Vietnamese: Telex, VNI and phone keyboards

Vietnamese is not typed with Alt codes; people use an input method that adds the marks as they type. One of the two most widely used is Telex: double a letter for the circumflex (aa → â, ee → ê, oo → ô), add w for the breve and the horn (aw → ă, ow → ơ, uw → ư), type dd for đ, and add s, f, r, x or j for sắc, huyền, hỏi, ngã or nặng. So Vieejt Nam becomes Việt Nam and tieengs Vieejt becomes tiếng Việt; z removes a mark you did not want.

VNI does the same with number keys: 1 sắc, 2 huyền, 3 hỏi, 4 ngã, 5 nặng, 6 circumflex, 7 horn, 8 breve and 9 for đ, so Vie6t5 gives Việt. On a Mac, add Vietnamese Telex or VNI under Keyboard → Input Sources. Recent Windows versions offer Vietnamese Telex and Number Key (VNI) keyboards in the language settings, and many people install the free Unikey or EVKey instead. On iPhone and Android, add the Vietnamese keyboard (Gboard on Android) and choose Telex or VNI.

For one or two letters, copying from the tables above is quickest. In Word you can also type a Unicode code and press Alt+X: 1EA1 gives ạ, 0111 gives đ and 20AB gives ₫. In HTML, write the letters directly in UTF-8, or use codes like đ for đ and ₫ for ₫.

Vietnamese characters in Unicode, and the look-alikes to avoid

Most of the letters with two marks, from Ạ ạ to Ỹ ỹ, live in the Latin Extended Additional block of Unicode, which gathered them for Vietnamese. The same letter can also be stored as a plain vowel followed by combining marks: â followed by the combining acute ́ looks just like the ready-made ấ. Both are valid, but mixing them can trip up search and sorting, so the ready-made letters are the safer choice; the five combining tone marks are here for the cases where you need them on their own.

Before Unicode, Vietnamese computers used rival encodings such as VNI, TCVN3 and VISCII, and text typed in one came out as garbage in another. If an old document shows strange symbols in place of accents, it was most likely written in one of those and needs converting.

One look-alike is worth knowing: the capital Đ (U+0110) is drawn just like the Icelandic eth Ð (U+00D0), but they are different letters, and only Đ is Vietnamese. The small forms give it away: Vietnamese đ, Icelandic ð. You will also see two styles of placing the tone on oa, oe and uy, hoà and hòa, thuý and thúy; both are in use.

Quotation marks, the đồng sign ₫ and where Vietnamese is spoken

Vietnamese uses the same punctuation as English, with curly quotes “ ” for speech and ‘ ’ inside them. Novels often open each line of dialogue with a dash instead of quotation marks.

Vietnam's currency is the đồng, written ₫: a d with a bar and an underline. The sign goes after the amount, and a dot separates thousands: 35.000 ₫. In everyday life people often write 35.000đ or 35k, and VND in banking.

The CLDR estimates count about 92 million Vietnamese speakers, about 91 million of them in Vietnam 🇻🇳. Large communities abroad include the United States 🇺🇸, at about 1.2 million, and Canada 🇨🇦, at about 250,000, and there are long-established communities in Australia, France and Cambodia too. For the country's flag, food and holiday emoji, see the Vietnam collection; the United States and Canada have collections of their own.