Writing Vietnamese correctly requires diacritics that aren’t commonly used in Western languages. Miss one out and you completely change the meaning of what you’re writing. As I frequently communicate in Vietnamese it’s important to be able to input diacritics, which is a bit of problem since Western keyboards don’t include them. On my own laptop I use IBus to allow me to switch into UniKey mode, but it’s a bit fiddly to set up, and it’s not an option when I’m using a different computer. I’ve long been aware that when running Linux it’s possible to use the <AltGr> key to get access to more diacritics, for example for accents in European languages. Today I discovered that it’s also possible to use <AltGr> to access the full range of Vietnamese characters. Here are the non-Western characters:
- đ =
<AltGr> + f - Ð =
<AltGr> + <Shift> + D - circumflex =
<AltGr> + 'followed by character, e.g. ô - breve =
<AltGr> + <Shift> + #followed by character, e.g. ă - horn =
<AltGr> + <Shift> + jfollowed by character, e.g. ơ
And here are all the tones/dấu:
- acute/sắc =
<AltGr> + ;followed by character, e.g. ý - grave/huyền =
<AltGr> + #followed by character, e.g. à - tilde/ngã =
<AltGr> + ]followed by character, e.g. sẽ - question/hỏi =
<AltGr> + jfollowed by character, e.g. ủa - dot/nặng =
<AltGr> + /followed by character, e.g. ạ
It’s common for a non-Western character to have a tone on it, which requires combining one option from each list. For example, to write ừ, press <AltGr> + <Shift> + j followed by <AltGr> + # followed by u.
Bây giờ tôi viết tiếng Việt giỏi hơn!
As a side note, I also recommend https://vietnameseaccent.com/ if need to add diacritics to some Vietnamese text in a hurry, although since you’re submitting your data to someone else’s website I wouldn’t recommend using it for anything private! It’s also not always correct.