Why does Vietnamese use Latin characters in their written language?

This is something that a person visiting Vietnam will notice right away and it has a pretty interesting history and as it turns out, this is a part of their history that I have recently discovered is actually not known, or at least not remembered, but most of the Vietnamese people that I have spoken to.

When you get here as opposed to most other Asian countries, you will notice that their written language has a lot in common with the language that you likely speak.

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When I first came here and noticed this I thought hooray! this will make it easier for me to learn and remember the local language! Turns out that is completely untrue because Vietnamese, thanks to the tones and the fact that many of the letters are pronounced differently, is exceptionally difficult to learn, let alone master. I gave up a few years ago and only know a few phrases and words. I don't actually know very many westerners that speak the language at all, let alone fluently. But there was a guy a long long time ago that dedicated a large portion of his life to learning the language, becoming completely fluent in it, and then taking it upon himself to transcribe the language to Latin characters for the world to get to know the country better or something. He was a Christian missionary so he might have had some ulterior motives.

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The man's name is Francisco de Pina and after many years of studying and doing Jesuit stuff, he arrived in Vietnam in 1617. While it is unclear what his work in Vietnam actually was, I think we can safely assume that it was missionary work and his was unique because he became completely fluent in Vietnamese and is credited as being the very first foreigner ever to accomplish this. When speaking to other missionaries, he compelled many of them that learning the local language was essential to their work in the country. One of them was a French missionary named Alexandre de Rhode, who is also credited with transliterating the sounds of the Vietnamese language into Latin characters.

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De Rhode wrote a book called "a dictionary of Vietnamese, Portuguese, and Latin languages" and it became the basis for the way in which Vietnamese is written to this day. At the time of its release it served as a translation book of sorts and resulted in many missionaries being better prepared for their work in Vietnam. I suppose this could be one of the reasons why Christianity is very widespread in Vietnam to this day. Prior to these two men's involvement in the country the written language in Vietnam was a version of Chinese characters that has been used since 111 B.C.

So great was the influence of the "new written language" that there are extremely few people that can still read the ancient Vietnamese/Chinese script that are alive today.

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Don't get excited about your ability to easily learn an Asian language because it has the "same" letters as your own though. Unfortunately it isn't like that and it has been my experience that the presence of characters that I already know actually make it more difficult for me to remember the words since the letters are pronounced quite differently. I think that for people fluent in a language that always has used Latin characters that seeing something you are familiar with actually serves as a detriment to learning Vietnamese words because our brains default to what we already know when we see those characters. I don't have a specific example to offer you right now, but I just know that a sequence of Latin or English (if you will) characters do NOT sound like it would in the other language.

To me this was just really interesting and when I see a Vietnamese person that i have known for a while I ask them if they have heard of Francisco de Pina and everyone has answered "no." I don't know if this is a national pride thing or what, but when they look it up online they have an "ah-ha!" moment that suggests to me that at some point in time during their education they actually were taught about the origin story of their language.

I don't know if there are any other countries in the world that basically had their language changed by non-violent means but at least as far as I know Vietnam is unique in this regard.