Vietnam language

As far as I know, Vietnam have their own unique language. Though they use English letters, they still have language that are distinct.

The Japanese imposed Hangul? What? I thought it was developed by a Korean and loosely based on Sanskrit.

Sarmat is right, though, Vietnam switched from Chinese characters to the Latin alphabet during colonial times. Chinese characters are only really practical for Chinese languages so other languages that once used them (Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese) all switched to something else (even if only partially in the case of Japanese) as soon as an alternative was widely available.

Actually, Hangul was already quite distinct from Chinese. Some Chinese characters were borrowed, but much of Hangul was Korean originally. This is because most of the commonly used phrases used the shape of the mouth to form unique Hangul character, and some difficult phrases used Chinese to be used as 'short term solution'.

Originally posted by pekau   Just because Europeans colonized for few hundred years... would that be enough for people of Vietnam to adopt Latin alphabets that quickly? Besides, Europeans didn't exactly assimiliated the people of Vietnam... so the natives would still find themselves using their own traditional language...

Originally posted by Sarmat12 However, Vietnamese suffered a lot from the abandonment of Chinese characters. They became alienated from thousands years of their history since the historic records were written in Chinese characters and very few experts can read Vietnamese in Chinese characters now.

Interesting. I didn't know that. This is why I hope China never abandons their writing system, because far too much would be lost in the process. Chinese characters don't make much sense for other languages, but for Chinese they are very versatile and allow passages written in mutually unintelligible dialects, or written thousands of years ago to be understood by almost anyone. The Latin alphabet can't do that.