The official Vietnamese writing system has been transformed significantly through different periods of its history. Its typography was strongly influenced by the current political governments in Vietnam at that time. The classical Chinese (chữ Hán) was popularly used in Vietnam during a-thousand-year ruling period of several Chinese dynasties (from 207 BC to 939 AD). Even though the classical Chinese (chữ Hán) was forced to use in Vietnam by the Chinese dynasties, the plan encountered some obstacles because the Chinese characters are represented by symbolic characters and do not express their phonology and meanings explicitly. Therefore, the Sino-Vietnamese (chữ Hán – Việt) vocabulary system was introduced by Vietnamese scholars in order to provide a correspondent set of words that have similar sounds to the classical Chinese but is pronounced on the basis of the phonology of the local Vietnamese language.

In 938 Vietnam obtained its freedom by the battle of Bach Dang River after a thousand years under the Chinese dynasties. However, the classical Chinese continued to be used in Vietnam. By the thirteenth century, some Vietnamese scholars used the standard classical Chinese to develop a new writing script, called the Southern characters (chữ Nôm) to represent the current Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and other Vietnamese words. The Southern characters were not widely used in the country due to their complex logographic writing based on the classical Chinese system.

The early years of the seventeenth century were the most important period in the history of the official Vietnamese writing system. Some Roman Catholic missions were carried out in Vietnam under the support of the Society of Jesuit (Dòng Tên hay Hội dòng Giêsu) to preach and spread the messages of God to the country. One of their activities was to learn the Vietnamese language and create a systematic dictionary for their spoken language. The Portuguese missionaries Francisco de Pina, his two students, Gaspar d’Amaral and Antonio Barbosa and the French missionary Alexandre de Rhodes were the most important founders to the development of the official Vietnamese alphabet. The first Vietnamese-Portuguese dictionary was composed by Gaspar d’Amaral and Antonio Barbosa. Alexandre de Rhodes studied Vietnamese from Francisco de Pina and later he used Pina’s method to continue the previous work of Gaspar d’Amaral and Antonio Barbosa. He then wrote the Vietnamese-Portugese-Latin dictionary and it was published in Rome in 1961. His publication was then used as the important groundwork for the development of the official modern Vietnamese orthography (chữ Quốc ngữ).

During the French colonial empire in Vietnam (1884-1945), the French government aimed to reduce the impact of the classical Chinese as well as the Sino-Vietnamese vocabularies by accepting the usage of the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet at schools, and in Vietnamese literature, and other documents.