I was recently watching some videos of people speaking various south-east Asian languages with subtitles in their own language and it occurred to me that among them all Vietnamese is a strange exception.

In what way? Well it’s the only one that still uses the western (latin) script for writing. All other countries around Vietnam: Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, (and China, of course) all have their own script to write their language in. Vietnam however uses a modified version of the Latin alphabet.

This is strange to me for two reasons:

Firstly, while i am no expert on the subject, it appears to me that this is a clear legacy of colonialism. Secondly, judging by how many modifications the Vietnamese alphabet has, all the various diacritics and tone indicators that are necessary to make it work, this would suggest to me that the Latin alphabet is just not a good fit for the specific phonology and tonal nature of the Vietnamese language.

Wouldn’t it be better for Vietnam to develop its own script (or re-adopt a historical one)? One that is tailor made to fit the Vietnamese language instead of trying to force it into the ill-fitting mold of a western latin alphabet? Should Vietnam not decolonize its language, is what i’m asking, and why didn’t it do so under Ho Chi Minh? Isn’t it time to discard this legacy of colonial imposition and of European cultural domination of Vietnam?

The same goes for other non-European languages (and even some European, particularly the Slavic ones which would probably be better suited to Cyrillic and wouldn’t need to use so many “workarounds” to represent sounds that don’t exist in Latin descended languages) that still use a version of the Latin alphabet despite this script not being a natural fit for the language and only having been adopted due to European colonialism.

Or is this just a really stupid thought i had and nobody really cares? I don’t know, what do you guys think?