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. It is 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...
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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. It is 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.
Most of the consonants are pronounced approximately as in the International Phonetic Alphabet, with the following clarifications:
The digraph GH and the trigraph NGH are basically variants of g and ng used before i, in order to avoid confusion with the digraph GI. For historical reasons, they are also used before e or ê.
The correspondence between the orthography and pronunciation is somewhat complicated. In some cases, the same letter may represent several...
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