Sort of. Indonesian had Jawi, based on the Arabic script. People in today's Vietnam mostly wrote in Chinese AFAIK. Those methods of writing were dominant among the people who could write. But the populations were mostly illiterate, so it was easy for colonial administrators to supplant the existing writing systems with Latin as they introduced European-style schooling.
Despite its name, Jawi wasn’t used all that much in Java – it had always been more popular in the Malay peninsula. Java, as with many parts of Indonesia, used Brahmic abugidas descended from the Pallava script of Southern India (just like the Thai and Khmer scripts). Latin was chosen to write the Indonesian language for the same reason Malay was chosen as the language’s base: it was a politically neutral choice to unite a diverse archipelago.
Vietnam adopted the Latin alphabet from a missionary of some sort a couple of centuries before they were colonized by France --at the time Vietnam was decolonizing from China. The French made some modifications to how the alphabet was used to represent their phonemes.
Btw, after a couple of days being super-confused in Thailand I reverse-engineered this history from signs in English I kept seeing that in no way matched the Thai pronunciation. Finally the penny dropped that whoever had come up with the "English" phonetic spelling of Thai words, was not an English speaker.
How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese?
I mean I note that there are some Chinese languages, with millions of speakers, where the largest written text they have is a bible written in a Roman script. If those are a challenge surely Vietnamese must be as well.
> How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese?
Not very well. The old vietnamese script with Chinese characters had a lot of custom additions not in Chinese to make it work. It clearly was ducktaped.
That was kind of like that with vietnamese, a mix of phonetic-only characters, fully custom characters and standard ones all blend together, it's quite a mess. I doubt any Chinese speaker can understand that.
The colonial administration didn't have to push too hard to make people switch, the customized chinese script wasn't very popular.
Like Korean and Japanese it has a different grammar and vocabulary. Japanese added a bunch other characters and Korean just made up a new (phonetic) script.
> No dominate written language at the time of European Colonialization
Vietnamese used to be written using Chinese orthography just like Japanese.
The French forcibly cracked down on this form of orthography, and following independence, later modernists attempting to copy Ataturk along with latent Sinophobia due to the Chinese colonial era meant this for of orthography has largely been relegated to ceremonial usage.
A similar thing happened with Bahasa Indonesia, as Indonesia's founding leadership was more secular and socialist in mindset compared to neighboring Malaysia where Jawi remained prominent because of the Islamist movement's role in Malaysian independence.
Another factor is that literacy rates were very low before colonization, in Vietnam to read or write using Chinese characters was never a broadly known skill (outside of the elite). This is a pretty big contrast to Japan, which had double-digit rates of literacy during the same era.
Malay culture adopted Arabic alphabet without colonization. I think colonization had less to do with it and more with the fact that the Alphabet is better and more practical. Same thing with modern numbers.
> There is evidence that Parameswara converted to Islam following his infatuation with and marriage to a girl from the Samudera Pasai Sultanate.
Doesn't that seem like the silliest thing you ever read? When the infatuation ended ( like all infatuations do ), did he convert back? The only thing royals are infatuated with is wealth and power. If anything, don't you think the guy converted to get preferable treatment from the arab traders or get special access to the arab trading network? There is more to the story for sure. But I'm not buying that fanciful story.
> Doesn't that seem like the silliest thing you ever read?
Not even close to be frankly honest.
Leaving aside the delibrate silliness of Edward Lear, Roald Dahl, et al and focusing just on origin stories relating to the spread of various beliefs ...
* Have you heard the one about the Buddist Monk, the Monkey, Pig, Fish, Dragon, and Horse spirits ?
* the tale of a great snake that carved rivers ?
* maybe that fishing boat passenger that got out and walked across the water ?
> If anything, don't you think the guy converted to get preferable treatment from the arab traders
I suspect the marriage was political .. but he wasn't marrying into a family of arab traders, Sultan Malikussaleh (the progenitor of the Samudera Pasai Sultanate) was an Acehnese man from part of what is now called Sumatra, a part of Indonesia.
> special access to the arab trading network
Was pretty low key wrt volume between the modern middle east and Indonesia back in the time we are looking at - the trade advantages by volume (ie. that which mattered) was all local to the greater archipelago.
Moreover, returning to the original point upthread, there's no evidence of colonisation by arabs in the sense of colonisation by the British of India or various parts of Africa, colonisation by the Dutch in the East Indies, colonisation by the Germans in Africa and PNG, by the French in Vietnam, etc.
No. But Arabs didn't colonize the Malay islands. They just adopted Islam from their internal politics. Not sure why this triggered you, pretty much everybody is a colonizer.
The same way the latin world ended up with a Latin Alphabet. It's more practical and they never developed their own. Malaysia, for example, has Jawi which is the Arabic alphabet of the their language. The short answer: the language never developed an "alphabet" and thus adopted one.
The dutch colonization of indonesia started in the 1600s and ended in 1949. So plenty of time for the locals, especially the elites, to learn dutch and the alphabet.