Chữ nôm (quoc ngu spelling; 字喃 in Chinese characters, lit. "southern script") is a classical vernacular script (based on Chinese characters) of the Vietnamese language, and was the most common method of writing Vietnamese for over a millennium.

The script for writing Chinese characters in Vietnamese is hán tư or chữ nho (字儒). The former is considered heavily sinicized, and the latter is more common.

By the early 20th century the use of chữ nôm gave way to a Roman-style alphabet known as chu Quoc-Ngu. Although a vast cultural heritage and history remains written in chữ nôm, few Vietnamese today can read it.

After Vietnamese independence from China in 939 CE, scholars began their creation of chữ nôm, an ideographic script that represents Vietnamese speech. For the next 1,000 years — from the 10th century and into the 20th — much of Vietnamese literature , philosophy, history, law, medicine, religion, and government policy was written in Nom script. During the 14 years of the Tay Son emperors (1788-1802), all administrative documents were written in chữ nôm. In the 18th century, many notable Vietnamese writers and poets composed their works in chữ nôm, among them Nguyễn Du and Hồ Xuân Hương . In other words, approximately 1,000 years of Vietnamese cultural history is recorded in this unique system.

This heritage is now nearly lost. With the 17th century advent of quoc ngu — the modern roman-style script — nôm literacy gradually died out. In 1920, the colonial government decreed against its use. Today, fewer than 100 scholars world-wide can read nôm effectively. Much of Vietnam's vast, written history is, in effect, largely inaccessible to the 80 million speakers of the language, although a few Buddhist monks and the Jing, the Vietnamese living in China, can read nôm to some extent.

External links

• Vietnamese Nom Preservation Foundation
• Information on Chu Nom characters
• A-Z Chu Nom
• Chu Nom Script

Attribution

Original text provided by the Vietnamese Nom Preservation Foundation, with permission granted to publish this text under the GNU Free Documentation License.