468 - Is Modern Vietnamese Writing The Colonizer’s Alphabet? Viet Origins with Professor John Phan

The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen · Feb 11, 2026 · 1h 17m

Have you ever wondered why Vietnamese is written with a Romanized alphabet while its neighbors, China, Japan, and Korea, historically used character-based systems?

In this episode, Kenneth and Professor John Phan discuss the "startup age" of the Vietnamese script. We journey back to the 17th century to discover that Chữ Quốc ngữ wasn't just a colonial imposition, but a complex collaboration involving Portuguese pioneers, Italian linguists, and forgotten local consultants.

What We Explore:

The "Hip-Hop" Age of Nôm: How the 17th-century explosion of vernacular literature set the…