Vietnamese

Vietnamese ships four layouts. Tiếng Việt Telex is what you get when you add Vietnamese, and it spells every mark and tone with ordinary letters. Tiếng Việt VNI does the same with digits. Tiếng Việt is a plain QWERTY with the accented letters on long-press, and Tiếng Việt T9 is the keypad (see Ambiguous layouts). This page is about Telex and VNI, because they're the two that build letters out of keys.

Turning it on

Languages & layouts / Tiếng Việt · Vietnamese / Layouts

Add Vietnamese and Telex is on. Tap the VNI card on the same screen if that's the method you learned, and turn Telex off if you don't want both in the switch ring. Then download the Vietnamese word list from the Dictionary row. Telex and VNI type fine without it, but the list is what gives you suggestions, lets you go back into a word you already typed, and, if you ask for it, puts back a mark you missed.

Telex

The word you're typing shows up already composed, marks and all, and the space commits it.

You type	You get
aa, ee, oo	â, ê, ô	circumflex
aw	ă	breve
ow, uw	ơ, ư	horn
w on its own	ư	tw is tư
uow + a final consonant	ươ	nuocsw is nước, huowng is hương
dd	đ
s, f, r, x, j	sắc, huyền, hỏi, ngã, nặng	tieengs is tiếng
z	takes the tone off	toansz is toan

The tone key can go anywhere after the vowels, and it doesn't have to be last. tieengs and tieesng both give tiếng, because the keyboard puts the tone on the right vowel by the usual rule rather than on the letter you typed it after. So hoafng is hoàng, and thuowr is thuở, since a vowel with a mark of its own takes the tone.

A mark key doesn't have to come straight after its letter either. dod is đo, tono is tôn, and nuocsw is nước: the key looks back for the letter it names, as long as the word it makes could still be Vietnamese. hello has no such letter and stays as it is. banana does, and comes out as bânna unless Only tone real syllables is on.

Taking a mark back

Press the same key again and the mark comes off and the letter goes in instead. hass is has, aaa is aa, and oww is ow. For a tone there's also z, which removes the tone and types nothing. With no tone to remove, z is just a z.

A w on its own is ư, and a second w turns it back into w. Every w after that is a w as well, so holding the key down types a run of them instead of flipping between ư and w.

uo and ươ

huơ, quơ and thuở are written with a plain u, while hương, người and đường horn both letters. They're the same keys until the end of the word, so the keyboard decides once it can see what follows:

• huow is huơ, and huowng is hương, because a final consonant makes it ươ.
• nguowif is người, because ng can't come before an open uơ.
• After qu the u belongs to the qu, so quow is quơ and quowng is quơng.
• ww after uo horns the u too, if you want ươ and the keyboard picked uơ.

English on Telex

Telex reads letters as marks, which gets in the way of English typed on the same keyboard. Two things keep the common cases readable:

• A word that starts with w keeps its w when what follows can't come after ư. why, when, we, with and web stay English.
• A doubled key is always an escape hatch: hass is has, oww is ow.

For anything more, turn on the setting below, or switch to the plain Tiếng Việt layout for a stretch of English.

Only toning real syllables

Languages & layouts / Tiếng Việt · Vietnamese / Tone marks / Only tone real syllables

Off by default. Telex normally puts a tone on anything with a vowel in it, so fas becomes fá even though no Vietnamese word starts with f. Turn this on and a tone key only marks a word that Vietnamese could actually spell. Anything else gets the letter instead: fas stays fas and fix stays fix. A word that picked up a mark but turned out not to be Vietnamese goes back to the keys you typed, so banana stays banana. It goes by Vietnamese spelling rather than by guessing at English, so mix is still mĩ, because that's a word. Abbreviations with no vowel keep their đ, so ddc, ddt and ddh still give đc, đt and đh. The setting covers VNI too.

VNI

VNI is the same engine with digits for the marks.

You type	You get
a6, e6, o6	â, ê, ô
a8	ă
o7, u7	ơ, ư
d9	đ
1, 2, 3, 4, 5	sắc, huyền, hỏi, ngã, nặng
0	takes the tone off

A digit with nothing to mark is typed as the digit, so banana1, a street number or a model name keeps its numbers. 0 only does something when the word has a tone. Otherwise it's a 0.

Backspace

Backspace takes off the last letter you can see, not the last key you pressed. huowngs is hướng, and one press leaves hướn with the tone still on the ơ. hif is hì, and one press takes the whole ì, tone included.

Going back into a word

Put the cursor at the end of a Vietnamese word you already typed and you can carry on typing it. A tone key typed there marks that word rather than being added as a letter, so coming back to the end of chao and typing f gives chào. This needs a word list on the device (the same condition as for any other language), and it only kicks in for a word the keys could have typed. A word with marks Telex or VNI can't produce is left alone.

Filling in what you left out

Languages & layouts / Tiếng Việt · Vietnamese / Tone marks / Fill in left-out marks

Off by default, because lots of people type Vietnamese without marks on purpose. Turn it on, with autocorrect on and the Vietnamese word list downloaded, and a word typed without its marks gets them back when the list has only one way to read it. tieng becomes tiếng, khong becomes không, duong becomes đường, and ngieeng becomes nghiêng. One backspace takes the correction back and leaves the word as you typed it.

Two things it never does. A word the list already knows is never changed, so a real word with the wrong tone stays as typed. And a spelling with several readings is left alone: toan could be toàn, toán or toản, so the keyboard doesn't pick one.