Talk Vietnamese

4 Responses to “Is Vietnamese the only Asian language that uses letters?”

1. chem_student Says:
   July 20th, 2010 at 9:46 am

   If you are referring to Romanization, then yes I think Vietnam is the only Asian country with letters you would see in English alphabet. However, I do believe that Filipino is also romanized, if you consider Filipino to be Asian.

   In response to Mikhail, Chinese Japanese Korean and Vietnamese are actually related to each other. I have studied both the Chinese and Vietnamese languages, and I originally had doubts that they were related, but now I think otherwise. In fact, you can barely speak Vietnamese without using Chinese or French words. I’m not saying that the words sound the same, it’s just that the words are borrowed. So basically after borrowing a certain word, they "Vietnamatize" it.
   For example "gia đình" in Vietnamese versus "jiā tíng" in Chinese. They mean family.
   Or "đánh điện thoại" in Viet versus "dǎ diàn huà" in Chinese. They both literally mean hit the telephone. But it means to call using the telephone. They are similar in the sense that they both use the word "to hit."
   There are many more similarities.
   I also have Korean friends and a lot of words that they used are actually quite related to Chinese.
   And as for Japanese, is Kanji not related to Chinese?

   To relate this more to your question, even though Vietnamese does use Romanized letters, in the past, this wasn’t the case. China has played a major role in shaping Vietnamese language and culture. In fact, back then people had to know Chinese in order to communicate. There was never really an official writing system. So even though Vietnamese is romanized, some people do write the traditional way, but more for artistic purposes. As you can see, during the Lunar New Year, you would start seeing Vietnamese red banners that do not have Vietnamese letters on them. The words seem like Chinese.

2. eezy_jex ® Says:
   July 20th, 2010 at 9:46 am

   Letters?

   Filipinos were using English letters (Roman)

   edit:
   and I think Indonesians and Malaysians too.

   Α†Ω™

3. Mikhail Says:
   July 20th, 2010 at 9:46 am

   Well, the first question is "what do you consider to be an Asian language?" Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai have NO relation to one another. Not a single one of these five major Asian languages has even the most distant genetic relationship to any other one. It has been proposed that Korean and Japanese are related, but this has not been proven.

   If you want to consider any language spoken on the Asian continent an "Asian language" then literally hundreds of them use letters. All of the languages written in the Arabic, Latin and Cyrillic scripts throughout the Middle East and Central Asia use "letters" and some Dravidian scripts in India act similarly to alphabets that use letters (these are abugidas). You might also be surprised to know that there are five or six Sintic languages (related closely to Mandarin) that are written in the Latin alphabet.

   Amongst the major languages of the far east, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Indonesian and Malaysian are written in the Latin alphabet. Thai, Cambodian and Burmese are all written using abugidas. An abugida is a writing system where one character represents a sound, but most vowels don’t have individual letters. Vowels are often shown by adding diacritics to the consonant sounds.

   Mongolian is also written in a unique variant of the Cyrillic alphabet.

4. G. #2 Says:
   July 20th, 2010 at 9:46 am

   Arabic uses letters

   Yes, Arabic originated in Arabia, which is in Asia.