Vietnamese Fonts

Vietnamese fonts were first written down, from the 13th century onwards, using variant Chinese characters, each of them representing one word. The system was based on the script used for writing classical Chinese, but it was supplemented with characters developed in Vietnam (chữ thuần nôm, proper Nom characters) to represent native Vietnamese words.

Fonts of the Vietnamese alphabet, called Chữ Quốc Ngữ (script of the national language), usually shortened to Quốc Ngữ (national language), is the current writing system for the Vietnamese language. Vietnamese fonts are based on the Latin alphabet (more specifically the Portuguese version of it) with some digraphs and the addition of nine accent marks or diacritics — four of them to create additional sounds, and the other five to indicate the tone of each word. The many diacritics, often two on the same letter, make written Vietnamese easily recognizable.

As a result of influence from the Chinese writing system, each syllable in Vietnamese is written separately as if it were a word. In the past, syllables in multisyllabic words were concatenated with hyphens, but this practice had died out, and hyphenation is now reserved for foreign borrowings. For Vietnamese fonts, a written syllable consists of at most three parts, in the following order from left to right:

An optional beginning consonant part:

• An optional ending consonant part
• A required vowel syllable nucleus and the tone mark, if needed, applied above or below it
• An optional ending consonant part, can only be one of the following: c, ch, m, n, ng, nh, p, t, or nothing.