Nôm
Like Chinese, Vietnamese is a tonal language. It has nearly 5,000 distinct syllables, far more than other East Asian language do. Phonetic scripts used elsewhere, including hangul in Korea and kana in Japan, do not indicate tone, so they cannot be applied to the Vietnamese language. As in Chinese, a semantic meaning is attributed to every syllable. This characteristic of the language may be can considered a result of the traditional writing system.