Key:name:vi

This key specifies the feature's Vietnamese name in the modern Latin alphabet (quốc ngữ).

How to map

Spell the name as posted on signs or according to common local usage, respecting capitalization, tone mark placement, and -i/-y. You can optionally provide other orthographic styles in alt_name:vi=* for the convenience of search engines that do not perform Vietnamese-specific diacritic folding. For example:

• A school in Vietnam: name:vi=Trung học Phổ thông Hoà Mĩ alt_name:vi=Trung học Phổ thông Hòa Mỹ
• A community center in the United States: name:vi=Trung Tâm Văn Hóa Việt-Mỹ alt_name:vi=Trung tâm Văn hoá Việt-Mĩ

Always include diacritics when known, even if they do not appear on a sign. Diacritics are essential to the meaning of a Vietnamese word, much more so than in other languages that use the Latin alphabet.

If Vietnamese is the local language, also set name=* to the same name as name:vi=*. Vietnamese is the official language of Vietnam, but indigenous languages are more widely spoken in some parts of the country; some of these languages use an orthography very similar to quốc ngữ. Vietnamese is also the predominant languages in a number of ethnic enclaves around the world, but do not assume that every POI or road in a Little Saigon is written in Vietnamese.

Use name:vi-Hani=* for the name in demotic characters (chữ Nôm) or name:lzh=* for the name in classical Chinese characters. There is no need to transcribe a mundane feature's name into demotic or classical Chinese characters, but these transcriptions may be relevant if signposted, which may be the case at a restaurant or place of worship for example. After all, there is no one-to-one correspondence between a quốc ngữ word and chữ Nôm character.

Tips for non-Vietnamese speakers

Vietnamese has a distinctive alphabet that can be easy to recognize based on the presence of certain diacritics and spelling patterns. See Wikipedia's language recognition guide for details.

Make sure to enter Vietnamese characters and not lookalikes, for example "Đ", not the Icelandic letter "Ð". Common Vietnamese typefaces and handwriting styles shape and place some diacritics differently than in European languages. For example, what appears to be "Ba'nh Bō No'ng Hôỉ" is actually "Bánh Bò Nóng Hổi".

Exonyms

Outside of Vietnam, it can be challenging to apply the on the ground rule because Vietnamese is not commonly used in international commerce. To the extent that there are Vietnamese speakers on the ground, Vietnamese names often go unsignposted. OSM generally uses the name:vi=* key to indicate how a Vietnamese speaker would refer to the place in writing, with some deference to the name preferred by the local Vietnamese-speaking community, if any.

Places in China and to some extent North Korea are generally rendered in the Vietnamese alphabet using Sino-Vietnamese words. Places in Japan and South Korea are rendered according to Western transliteration schemes. Places in Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand are often known by ad hoc Vietnamized names.

Vietnamese names of places outside of the Sinosphere are relatively unstandardized – or rather, overstandardized, with multiple competing standards to choose from. Some styles prioritize the integrity of the Vietnamese language and alphabet, while others prioritize consistency with Western languages, all in the name of intuitiveness. Each style has its adherents; none predominates overwhelmingly. Occasionally, local communities also have come up with folk names that are unknown to Vietnamese speakers elsewhere, a practice sometimes known as thấy mặt đặt tên (sight-naming). Google Maps tends to follow the Vietnam Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), sometimes unthinkingly ("Mê-hi-cô Xi-ti"), while Apple Maps tends to follow a more linguistically conservative style.

Examples of Vietnamese exonyms

English	Formal Sino-Vietnamese	Common Sino-Vietnamese	MOFA etc.	VASS	Folk name	Western borrowing	Wikipedia
Australia	Úc Đại Lợi	Úc	Ô-xtrây-li-a	Ôxtơrâylia	N/A	Australia	Úc
Italy	Ý Đại Lợi	Ý	I-ta-li-a	Italia	N/A	Italy	Ý
Moscow	Mạc Tư Khoa	Mạc Tư Khoa	Mát-xcơ-va	Matxcơva	N/A	Moskva	Moskva
New York	Nữu Ước	Nữu Ước	Niu Oóc	Niu Yooc	N/A	New York	New York
New Orleans	?	Tân Linh	?	?	Ngọc Lân, Níu Liên	New Orleans	New Orleans
Pyongyang	Bình Nhưỡng	Bình Nhưỡng	N/A	N/A	N/A	Pyongyang	Bình Nhưỡng
San Francisco	Cựu Kim Sơn	Cựu Kim Sơn	Xan Phran-xít-cô	San-phran-xit-co	Xăng Phăng	San Francisco	San Francisco

Since the project has relatively few Vietnamese-speaking contributors, OSM's style has tended to mirror Wikipedia's, as non-Vietnamese-speaking mappers have simply copied Vietnamese Wikipedia article titles along with those of other Wikipedia language editions. The Vietnamese Wikipedia preserves traditional Sino-Vietnamese names and respellings that are especially common, but otherwise it falls back to a lightly modified native name. In 2013, country names were briefly replaced with the spellings preferred by MOFA. [1] After some discussion, they were moved to alt_name:vi=*, since the official respellings are only available for a very limited number of toponyms, leaving the rest entirely unstandardized. In 2021, some names preferred by local Vietnamese communities were added to various cities in the United States. Some data consumers, such as the Daylight Map Distribution, have overridden these names to prefer names more well-known to users in Vietnam. [2]

Examples

• 

  name:vi=Vua Khô Bò & Ô Mai
  (not Vua Khô Bō & Ô Mai)

• 

  name:vi=Vĩnh Thành
  (not Viñh Thành)

• 

  name:vi=Sài Gòn and name:vi=Nguyễn Huệ

• 

  name:vi=Nguyện Đường Các Thánh Tử Đạo
  (not Nguyen Đuong Cac Thanh Tu Đao)

Implementation notes

Like speakers of other languages, Vietnamese speakers may enter words without diacritics when searching, so search engines need to perform diacritic folding to ensure high-quality results. However, the common, language-agnostic approach of stripping all diacritics from words is detrimental to Vietnamese speakers. The Vietnamese alphabet distinguishes two kinds of diacritics: those that are part of the base letter and tone marks. A base letter such as "â" should not be conflated with another base letter such as "a" or "ă". Otherwise, there is a high potential for false positives. Moreover, priority should be given to matching tone marks over mismatching tone marks. For example, searching for "Thanh Hóa" should return "Thanh Hóa", "Thanh Hoá", and "Thành Hóa" before "Thánh Hòa" or "Thánh Hoà".

Because diacritics are fundamental to the meaning of a word in Vietnamese, renderers should choose fonts in which the diacritics are easily discernible. Common problems include being unable to distinguish "ò", "ỏ", and "ó"; "ỵ" and "y"; "Tì" and "Ti"; "Tồ" and "Tô"; "ẳ" and "ẵ"; and "ơn", "ón", and "on". Vietnamese specialty fonts tend to exaggerate tone marks far more than pan-Latin fonts.

Maps in Vietnamese

• Wikimedia Maps (wikimedia.org)
• Wikimedia Maps (toolforge.org)
• OpenStreetMap Americana

See also

• Multilingual names
• Names – about names in general

External links

• Vietnamese language and computers on Wikipedia