Nôm

**Nôm** is a script formerly used in Vietnam. It involved the use of Chinese characters to write Vietnamese. The Van Ban bell, engraved in 1076, is the earliest known example of a Nôm inscription. The earliest surviving Nôm literature dates from the 13th century. The script was in common use until the 1920s. It was replaced by the Vietnamese alphabet. The Vietnamese alphabet is a form of the Latin alphabet.

Classical Chinese was used by the royal court and for other official purposes. The Temple of Literature in Hanoi was the best-known school for the study of Chinese. Students who passed the civil service examinations could go on to become magistrates. Confucian scholars saw Chinese as the language of education and looked down on Nôm, while popular opinion favored Nôm. Only a small percentage of the population was literate in any language, but nearly every village had at least one person who could read Nôm.

In Nôm, a Vietnamese word can be written using a Chinese character for a word with a similar meaning or pronunciation. Each character represents an idea. Such characters are called "ideographs." In addition, each character represents a syllable or sound. Because traditional characters have this dual property, nearly every syllable in modern Vietnamese has acquired a semantic meaning. Even when the same characters appear in both languages, the order is different. Many Chinese phrases gained currency as loan words. Later, the word order could be reversed to correspond to normal Vietnamese syntax. The word "Vietnam" is from the Chinese *Nányuè* (南越), meaning “Southern Yue”. In Han-Viet, the same characters are read as . The word order was reversed in modern times. In Chinese, the phrase “Chinese characters” is written 漢字. This is romanized as *hànzì* in pinyin, kanji in Japanese, hanja in Korean, and  in Han-Viet. In modern Vietnamese, they are .

### Character construction
The majority of the characters used in Nôm are of Chinese origin and are composed phonosemantically. For example, the character "喃" is read as "*Nôm*", whose phonetic component "南" is similar to the Cantonese pronunciation *Naam4* and means “chattering.” This rule is consistent in all Chu Nôm characters as all Vietnamese-made characters are composed using this method. The word "Nôm" does not have any negative connotation in Vietnamese, but rather suggests plain talk, something easy to understand. The V3 characters were extracted from manuscripts.

## History 
Chinese characters were introduced to Vietnam after the Han Empire conquered the country in 111 BC. Independence was achieved in 939, but the Chinese writing system was adopted for official purposes in 1010. Vietnamese began to use Chinese characters to write in their language at about this time. The Van Ban bell, engraved in 1076, is the earliest known example of a Nôm inscription. In 1838, Jean-Louis Taberd wrote a Nôm dictionary that eventually gained general acceptance and wide circulation.

In the 19th century, there was a flowering of popular literature written in Nôm, including such classics as Nguyen Du's *The Tale of Kieu* and the poetry of Ho Xuan Huong. Although only 3 to 5 percent of the population was literate, nearly every village had someone who could read Nôm aloud for the benefit of other villagers. 

In Korea and Japan, the traditional writing system was simplified so it could be taught to the general public. Vietnam's educated class looked down on Nôm as inferior to Chinese, so it was not interested in doing the work required to simplify and standardize the system so that it could be used for mass communication.

Like Chinese, Vietnamese is a tonal language. It has nearly 5,000 distinct syllables, far more than other East Asian languages do. Phonetic scripts used elsewhere, including hangul in Korea and kana in Japan, do not indicate tone, so they cannot be applied to the Vietnamese language. As in Chinese, a semantic meaning is attributed to every syllable. This characteristic of the language may be considered a result of the traditional writing system.

Beginning in the late 19th century, the French colonial authorities promoted the use of the Vietnamese alphabet, which they viewed as a stepping stone toward learning French. Language reform in other Asian nations stimulated Vietnamese interest in the subject. Following the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, Japan was often cited as a model for Asian modernization. Nationalists embraced the alphabet as *quốc ngữ* (the national language), and as a tool for promoting literacy. The Confucian education system was compared unfavorably to the Japanese system of public education. Nationalist writer Phan Boi Chau encouraged the young to "study in the East," meaning Japan.

The popularity of Hanoi's short-lived Tonkin Free School suggested that broad reform was possible. In 1910, the colonial school system adopted a "Franco-Vietnamese curriculum," which emphasized French and alphabetic Vietnamese. The teaching of Sino-Vietnamese characters was discontinued in 1917. On December 28, 1918, King Khai Dinh declared that the traditional writing system no longer had official status. The civil service exam was given for the last time at the imperial capital of Hue on January 4, 1919. This exam tested knowledge of Chinese. The examination system, and the education system based on it, had been in effect for almost 900 years. China itself abandoned Classical Chinese soon afterward as part of the May Fourth Movement.

In the 1920s, the Vietnamese alphabet became the country’s dominant writing system. By the 1930s, the use of Sino-Vietnamese characters was largely restricted to books with limited woodbock printings intended for the Buddhist clergy. In more recent times, traditional characters have been used mainly in calligraphy, such as wedding decorations. In 2012, manuscripts in Classical Chinese were translated to support Vietnam's claim to the Paracel Islands.

## Most common characters
The following are the twenty-five most common characters in Nôm literature. The modern spelling is given in italics.

*  *là* to be
*  *và* and
*  *các* each; every
*  *một* one
*  *có* there is
*  *của* of
*  *được* to get
*  *trong* in
*  *trong* clear
*  *người* people
*  *những* (plural marker)
*  *học* to learn
*  *như* as
*  *từ* word
*  *hội* to meet
*  *hay* or; good
*  *không* not
*  *thể* body
*  *tư* four
*  *cũng* also
*  *với* with
*  *cho* to give
*  *xã* society, company
*  *này, nơi* place
*  *để* to place

## Notes
## Citations
## Sources 
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* . This book lists 8,187 Nôm characters.
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* . This is the most comprehensive Nôm dictionary with over 19,000 characters.
*  This includes the character list for V0, the original 1993 Nôm standard.
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* . Hồng was the leader of the Nôm encoding project. This dictionary contains 12,000 entries.
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* . This article tells how the Nom Na Tong font was created.
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*  Ngô's group was sponsored by the Nôm Foundation. This work was later integrated into the *Hán Nôm Coded Character Repertoire* (2008).
*  This is a comprehensive bibliography.
* . This book contains 17,761 Sino-Vietnamese characters. 
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*  This is the most widely available Nôm reference. It is an updated version of Vũ Văn Kính’s 1971 work.
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## Fonts
Some characters in this article may require the installation of an additional font to display properly:
* Hanamin B  &nbsp;– This Japanese font supports nearly 90,000 characters, including those in Unicode CJK Extension C.
* Nom Na Tong “Nôm Na Tống Light” – created by the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation. It is based on characters found in *Thiền Tông Bản Hạnh* (The Origin of Buddhist Meditation, 1933) by Thanh Tu Thich. .
* NomNaTongLight&nbsp;– This font, created by the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation, is based on characters found in traditional Vietnamese woodblock prints.
* Han Nom Font Set &nbsp;– This open-source font supports over 70,000 Unicode CJK codepoints.
* Fonts for Chu Nom. How to display and use Han-Nom characters.

## Other websites
* Chunom.org  "This site is about Chu Nom, the old writing system of Vietnam."
* Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation. Features a dictionary with the complete set of Sino-Vietnamese characters.
* Han-Nom Collection , digitized manuscripts held by the National Library of Vietnam.
* Han-Nom Research Institute 
* *Tạp chí Hán Nôm * [Journal of Han-Nom Studies]
* Ngành Hán Nôm . A four-year program in Han-Nom is offered at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities of Ho Chi Minh City.
* Cách Gõ Chữ Hán Nôm - WinVNKey Software to allow the entry of Han-Nom characters by reading.
* 倉頡之友《倉頡平台2012》  Cangjie input method for Windows that allows keyboard entry of all Unicode CJK characters by character shape. Supports over 70,000 characters. Users may add their own characters and character combinations.