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Vietnamese Alphabet (Latin)

The letters and characters of Vietnamese written in the Latin script, in order — every standard character with its name and codepoint, the additional and punctuation sets, and exactly how many fonts include them. About 92,370,781 people read or write it across 4 countries.

Standard characters

The minimal set of characters required for Vietnamese — the language's alphabet, in its traditional order. Tap a character to copy it; each name opens the full character page. The Fonts column counts how many fonts include each letter, in the same order as the letters and codepoints; an accented form under a letter gets its own codepoint and count line beneath it.

How the Vietnamese alphabet works

Vietnamese is written in the Latin alphabet, extended to 29 letters. Seven of them are made by adding a shape mark to a familiar letter: Ă, Â, Ê, Ô and the horned Ơ and Ư, plus Đ, a d with a line through it. The letters f, j, w and z are not in the alphabet at all — they turn up only in foreign words. Each letter, and each two-letter combination, stands for exactly one sound, and the chart gives them: c and k are the same k doing spelling duty in different places, and qu is always kw.

Two letters change their sound with the region — the chart notes them. In the north, d and r have both come out as z, and s is a curled-back sh; in the south, d is y, r is a real r, and s is plain. The vowel letters hide the main work of the shape marks: a breve (the little cup on ă) shortens a vowel, a circumflex (â, ê, ô) gives it the closed quality, and the horn (ơ, ư) marks two deep vowels that English simply does not have — a long, open uh, and a u said with the lips spread flat instead of rounded.

On top of the shape marks come the tones. Vietnamese has six tones, and five of them are written as a second mark stacked over or under a vowel: the rising hook, the falling grave, the question-mark hook, the tilde and the heavy dot below — a syllable like “ma” can carry any of them, and each is a different word. Digraphs do the rest of the heavy lifting: gh and ngh are not new sounds but g and ng spelled for use before e and i, ch is the soft ch, nh a ny, th a t with a puff of air, ph an f, and tr a curled ch.

Additional Characters

Used for foreign words, names and technical terms, and older forms of the language.

Punctuation characters

The marks used to separate sentences and to clarify meaning.

Where Vietnamese (Latin) is read

Countries shaded by the share of their population that reads or writes Vietnamese in the Latin script. The map is zoomed to the region where at least 1% of a country's people read it; neighbouring countries are shown unshaded for context.