Vietnamese Alphabet: 29 Letters, Diacritics and Six Tones

Bảng chữ cái tiếng Việt: the 29-letter alphabet, its marks and its six tones

The Vietnamese alphabet has 29 letters. It is written in the Latin alphabet (called chữ Quốc ngữ), which makes Vietnamese one of the easiest Asian languages to start reading, but it is not the English alphabet: four familiar letters are absent (F, J, W, Z), and seven others (ă, â, đ, ê, ô, ơ, ư) are full letters in their own right, each with its own place in the dictionary. Sitting on top of that, and completely separate from it, is a second system of marks: the six tones.

The order a Vietnamese dictionary uses:

The letters that trip readers up, with plain a kept alongside so the three a-letters can be compared:

Two systems of marks, and they stack. The hook on ơ belongs to the letter: ơ is not o wearing an accent, it is the nineteenth letter of the alphabet. The mark on ớ is something else entirely, a tone mark, which says how the pitch of the syllable moves. Both can sit on the same vowel at the same time. Hà Nội shows the stacking in one word: the ộ is the letter ô (circumflex, letter-forming) carrying the dot of the nặng tone, while the à is a plain a carrying huyền.

Where the tone mark lands. It goes on the main vowel of the syllable. If ê, ô or ơ is present, the mark goes there: tiếng (language), người (person), phở. Otherwise it goes on the vowel nearest the end of the vowel cluster. You will see both hòa and hoà in print; that is a difference between two house styles for placing the mark, not two pronunciations.

No F, J, W or Z. The alphabet has never needed them: /f/ is written ph and /z/ is written gi. That is the ph of phở and of cà phê, from French café, just as ga (railway station) comes from gare. F, j, w and z turn up only in foreign material: wifi, jazz, brand names. There is a nice irony here: on the Telex keyboard layout that Vietnamese people type with every day, those four unused letters do the tone work. f adds huyền, j adds nặng, w turns a into ă and o/u into ơ/ư, and z strips the mark off again.

North and south, honestly. D and đ are different letters, and this is the trap that catches every beginner: đ is /ɗ/, close to English 'd', everywhere in the country, while plain d is 'z' in Hanoi and 'y' in Ho Chi Minh City. The same split affects gi and r (northern speech merges them into /z/; southern speech keeps r as a retroflex sound). Tones differ too: southern speech merges hỏi and ngã, so a southerner works with five distinct tones where a northerner has six. None of this changes the spelling: áo dài, bánh mì and Hồ Gươm are written the same in both halves of the country, and a learner who writes every mark is understood in both.

The marks are not decoration. Strip them and you do not get a plainer version of the word, you get a different word or none at all: phở is the soup, pho is the classifier in pho tượng (a statue). Learn each word with its marks from the first minute, the way you learn a noun's gender in German or French.