The dictionary was published by the Vietnam Social Sciences Publishing House under the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences (VASS) and the US’s Nom Script Heritage Preservation Association.
Compiled by linguistics researcher Professor Nguyen Quang Hong, the 2,323-page dictionary features 9,450 Nom scripts with more than 14,000 Vietnamese syllables.
The dictionary is considered the largest-ever linguistics research project in the country.
To complete the dictionary, Professor Hong, who is former deputy head of the Institute of Han-Nom (Sino-Nom) Studies, had to collect, represent by phonetic symbols, study and classify the script over several decades.
At the ceremony to release the dictionary, the author expressed his hope that the dictionary would contribute to preserve Nom scripts – a precious part of Vietnamese heritage.
