Chữ Nôm

Chữ Nôm (literally 'southern characters') was a logographic writing system developed by Vietnamese scholars to write the Vietnamese language using characters modeled on or adapted from Chinese. It emerged around the 10th century as a way to record native Vietnamese words, poetry, and personal names that had purely Vietnamese origins.

Chữ Nôm and Names

Chữ Nôm was significant for Vietnamese naming because it could represent names that had no equivalent in Chinese characters. The system used various strategies: borrowing Chinese characters for their sound, borrowing them for their meaning, or creating entirely new compound characters by combining semantic and phonetic elements.

Legacy and Preservation

Chữ Nôm fell out of common use in the early 20th century as Quốc ngữ became the dominant script. Today, very few Vietnamese can read Chữ Nôm, and the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation works to digitize and preserve the remaining corpus. For naming culture, Chữ Nôm represents an important chapter: it was the script of Nguyễn Du's epic poem Truyện Kiều and countless other literary works where Vietnamese names and identities were expressed in a distinctly Vietnamese written form.