Vietnamese calligraphy

Vietnamese Calligraphy

Lunar New Year banner written in Vietnamese calligraphy

Vietnamese calligraphy (Vietnamese Quốc Ngữ: thư pháp Việt Nam, Hán Nôm: 書法越南) refers to the calligraphic traditions of Vietnam. It can refer to calligraphic works using a variety of scripts, including Chinese characters, Chữ nôm, and the Latin-based Quốc Ngữ. Historically, calligraphers used the former two scripts. However, due to the adoption of the Latin-based Quốc Ngữ, most modern Vietnamese calligraphy instead uses Roman characters.

Traditional Vietnamese calligraphy is strongly affected by that of China for historical and geographic regions. As part of the East Asian cultural sphere, Chinese was often used as the written medium of communication, and as a result, Vietnamese calligraphy thus also follows Chinese calligraphy’s standard and use Han script (Chinese language) in many of its writings. Nonetheless, over time, Vietnam developed its own styles of calligraphy for writing both Classical Chinese and Chữ nôm.

In modern times, calligraphy has been done mainly in the Latin-based Quốc Ngữ script, as Chữ nôm and Chinese characters have largely fallen out of use. Quốc Ngữ calligraphy gained popularity during the New Poetry and Free Poetry Movements, due to the increasing popularity of using the Vietnamese vernacular, as well as influence from French literature. Modern Vietnamese calligraphy is undoubtedly influenced by modern Latin cursive, but is written using the calligraphy brush, rather than quill or reed pens as is done in Western calligraphy. Much as Chinese calligraphy is used to write poems, festive banners, signage, and so on, Vietnamese calligraphy can also serve the same purpose today.

There are a number of styles in modern Vietnamese calligraphy. A few include:

• Chân Phương: A basic, cursive style of calligraphy, using clear brush strokes that are quickly recognizable
• Cách Điệu: Approximately meaning "stylized writing," Cách Điệu is a method in which the Vietnamese word is arranged in such a way that it resembles a Chinese character with its corresponding meaning.

See also

• Chinese calligraphy
• History of writing in Vietnam
• Vietnamese alphabet
• Chữ nôm