Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on Chinese characters, but later replaced with the "Hangul" alphabet for Korean and supplemented with "kana" syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex "Chữ nôm" script. However, these were limited to popular literature until the late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters ("Kanji") and kana. Korean is written exclusively with Hangul in North Korea, and supplementary Chinese characters ("Hanja") are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of former French colonization, Vietnamese switched to a Latin-based alphabet.