Vietnamese language and computers

The Vietnamese language is written with a Latin script with diacritics (accent tones) which requires several accommodations when typing on phone or computers. Software-based systems are a form of writing Vietnamese on phones or computers with software that can be installed on the device or from third-party software such as UniKey. Telex is the oldest input method devised to encode the Vietnamese language with its tones. Other input methods may also include VNI (Number key-based keyboard) and VIQR. VNI input method is not to be confused with VNI code page. Historically, Vietnamese was also written in chữ Nôm, which is mainly used for ceremonial and traditional purposes in recent times, and remains in the field of historians and philologists. There have been attempts to type chữ Hán and chữ Nôm with existing Vietnamese input methods, but they are not widespread. Sometimes, Vietnamese can be typed without tone marks, which Vietnamese speakers can usually guess depending on context. There are as many as 46 character encodings for representing the Vietnamese alphabet. Unicode has become the most popular form for many of the world's writing systems, due to its great compatibility and software support. Diacritics may be encoded either as combining characters or as precomposed characters, which are scattered among the Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B, and Latin Extended Additional blocks. The Vietnamese đồng symbol is encoded in the Currency Symbols block. Historically, the Vietnamese language used other characters beyond the modern alphabet. The Middle Vietnamese letter B with flourish (ꞗ) is included in the Latin Extended-D block. The apex is not included in Unicode, but may serve as a rough approximation. Early versions of Unicode assigned the characters and for the purpose of placing these marks beside a circumflex, as is common in Vietnamese typography. These two characters have been deprecated; and are now used regardless of any present circumflex. For systems that lack support for Unicode, dozens of 8-bit Vietnamese code pages have been designed.

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Related concepts (2)

Korean language and computers

The writing system of the Korean language is a syllabic alphabet of character parts (jamo) organized into character blocks (geulja) representing syllables. The character parts cannot be written from left to right on the computer, as in many Western languages. Every possible syllable in Korean would have to be rendered as syllable blocks by a font, or each character part would have to be encoded separately. Unicode has both options; the character parts ᄒ (h) and ᅡ (a), and the combined syllable 하 (ha), are encoded.

Input method

An input method (or input method editor, commonly abbreviated IME) is an operating system component or program that enables users to generate characters not natively available on their input devices by using sequences of characters (or mouse operations) that are available to them. Using an input method is usually necessary for languages that have more graphemes than there are keys on the keyboard. For instance, on the computer, this allows the user of Latin keyboards to input Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indic characters.