The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen 468 - Is Modern Vietnamese Writing The Colonizer’s Alphabet? Viet Origins with Professor John Phan
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Feb 11, 2026 John Phan, a professor of Vietnamese history and linguistics, traces how Quốc Ngữ emerged from 17th-century collaborations between missionaries and local consultants. Short, lively segments explore Nôm’s literary boom, missionaries as field linguists, the glossary work of de Pina and de Rhodes, and how 20th-century print culture and reforms transformed a niche script into a national writing system.
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Origins Of Quoc Ngu
- Quoc Ngu traces to European missionaries who needed a script to translate the Bible into Vietnamese.
- The Roman alphabet choice reflects practical missionary networks, not a natural fit to Vietnamese history.
Pioneers: De Pina And De Rhodes
- Francisco de Pina arrived in southern Vietnam in the early 1600s and began Romanizing Vietnamese.
- Alexander de Rhodes later formalized that work and published a trilingual dictionary in 1651.
Why Quoc Ngu Spelling Is Odd
- Alexander de Rhodes did fieldwork across regions and coalesced earlier romanization efforts.
- The resulting orthography reflects Portuguese, Italian, and French phonologies and 17th-century pronunciations.
