Tags: Language.
Until the beginning of the 20th century government and scholarly documents in Vietnam were written in classical Chinese (called chữ nho Confucian script or chữ Hán Chinese script) using Chinese characters with Vietnamese approximation of Chinese pronunciations.At the same time popular novels and poetry in Vietnamese were written in the chữ nôm script which used Chinese characters for Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and an adapted set of characters for the native vocabulary.The two scripts coexisted until the era of French Indochina when the Latin alphabet quốc ngữ script gradually became the written medium of both government and popular literature.
