ACCORDING to a local news story in mid-August in Vietnam, the Vietnamese alphabet will not be receiving extra letters. The Ministry of Education denied a claim by the Department of Information Technology that it plans to add f, j, w and z to the current 29-letter alphabet. The back-and-forth nonetheless started a debate among the literati about language and heritage.
Authoritarian governments are often tempted by language planning, but in Vietnam's case, fiddling about with the writing system predates the modern regime. The Roman script as used there is based on the work of a 17th-century French Jesuit scholar, Alexandre de Rhodes, who learned the language there in some six months and then transposed into his alphabet.
Vietnam already had a script: chu nom, based on Chinese characters. Given a thousand-year occupation and some time spent as a vassal state of the vast neighbour, Chinese influence has run throughout parts of Vietnamese culture for millennia. Chu nom was the script of the mandarins and literati.
The French introduced quoc ngu (de Rhodes' work) in the 1920s. According to a scholar of Vietnam at Berkeley, Peter Zinoman, in his introduction to Vu Trong Phong's “Dumb Luck”, a popular 1930s satire of Hanoi's middle class, Romanisation fuelled a drive for modernization and better education. Thanks to the alphabet's rapid adoption, before long, chu nom was incomprehensible to most. Mr Zinoman writes that "Montesquieu and Voltaire replaced Confucius," and that "coupled with their inability to read characters, intellectually ambitious members of the interwar elite were left little choice but to immerse themselves in the literary traditions of France and its European neighbours.” In fact, he says, Phong wouldn't have learned anything but rudimentary characters under the old system, being from a poor, working-class family. The alphabet may have made his literary career possible.
Just because the alphabet was foreign didn't prevent the outbreak of a lively discussion over reforming quoc ngu today. Official sanction of F would have had little effect on Vietnamese as it's actually used. The letter already shows up in most signs for "café" rather than the officially correct "caphe", and all the omitted letters have corresponding sounds in the current alphabet.
But Vietnamese scholars took the opportunity to talk about what the script means to them. The debate has mostly been over modernisation and global integration versus cultural integrity. Pham Van Tinh, of the Institute of Lexicography and Encyclopaedia, argued that “these letters are very popular in many languages in the world” and that people already come across them in science and other areas. But another professor said that scripts are part of a country's “cultural heritage”, perhaps forgetting for a moment how recently quoc ngu had been adopted.
In the end, inertia won out. Changing the alphabet would have taken a lot of work and cost. Add to that the fact that Vietnam has a habit of ignoring its own legislation, whether on public smoking or motorcycle helmets. Getting another generation to sing a new alphabet song and under-resourced schools to print up new alphabet posters would have taken scarce time and money. Those who want to use f and the rest are just going to have to do it without official sanction.