VIETNAMESE LANGUAGE

For much of Vietnam's history, Classical {{link=Chinese languages">Chinese was the dominant literary language, and Chinese vocabulary given a Vietnamese pronunciation ("Sino-Vietnamese") remains a significant part of the language's lexicon. By the 13th century Chinese characters were adapted to write native Vietnamese words. In the 17th century Roman Catholic missionaries introduced a system of writing Vietnamese in the Latin alphabet with diacritics distinguishing vowel qualities and tones, a system that was widely adopted only in the 20th century.