How it began
Chu Nom was created by Vietnamese scholars who applied the structural principles of Chinese characters to their own language. Chinese characters had been used to transcribe Vietnamese names earlier, but the oldest surviving inscription of this kind is a stele at the Bao An pagoda, re-engraved in the 18th century from an original dated 1209, which lists 21 people and villages in an early form of Nom. King Tran Nhan Tong, who reigned from 1278 to 1293, ordered Nom used for proclamations, and Nguyen Thuyen composed a verse incantation in it in 1282.
Before it existed
Chinese characters reached the region after the Han dynasty conquered Nanyue in 111 BCE, and Literary Chinese was adopted for official purposes in 1010. Before Chu Nom, all formal writing in Vietnam was done in Classical Chinese, and formal writing stayed in Chinese until the early 20th century.
How it works
The script is logographic. Some Chinese characters were borrowed unchanged, either for Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary, for native words of similar meaning, or purely for their sound. Thousands of new characters were also invented. Most are phono-semantic compounds, which join one component that hints at the meaning with another that gives the approximate sound. Others combine two characters of similar meaning or modify an existing one. Because it built on written Chinese, the script was complex and was accessible to fewer than five percent of the population.
Who pushed back
Most of the Vietnamese elite wrote only in Classical Chinese up to the 19th century and criticized Nom. Ho Quy Ly made it the official script during the Ho dynasty of 1400 to 1407, and the Tay Son dynasty mandated it in government and examinations, but Ming occupation suppressed it, and Le dynasty governments banned it in 1663, 1718 and 1760 as a medium of social protest. The Nguyen emperors returned official business to Chinese.
What lasted
Between the 15th and 19th centuries Vietnamese writers used Chu Nom for popular works in the vernacular, many in verse. They include the poetry collection of Nguyen Trai, the poems of Ho Xuan Huong and The Tale of Kieu by Nguyen Du, first published in 1820. A Nom dictionary compiled by Jean-Louis Taberd in 1838 helped standardize the script.
Where it stands today
French colonial authorities promoted the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet, and the civil service examinations were held for the last time in Hue in 1919. Chu Nom was replaced by the Latin alphabet from the 1920s. It is now used for historical and liturgical purposes and studied at the Institute of Han-Nom Studies in Hanoi. Nom characters have been added to Unicode since 1994, and the Vietnamese Nom Preservation Foundation works on digital preservation.
