Vietnamese Lorem Ipsum Generator

About Vietnamese (Tiếng Việt)

Speakers: 95 million native speakers.
Where it's spoken: Vietnam and Vietnamese diaspora (USA, France, Australia).
Script: Latin alphabet (Quốc Ngữ) with extensive tone marks and combined diacritics.
Direction: left-to-right (LTR).
Text expansion vs English: substantially longer (~30% expansion).
Unique characters to verify: Six tone marks (ngang, huyền, sắc, hỏi, ngã, nặng) layered on top of vowel diacritics; ă, â, đ, ê, ô, ơ, ư.

A short history of the Latin alphabet

Vietnamese was historically written in Chinese characters (Chữ Hán) and a Vietnamese-adapted system (Chữ Nôm). The current Latin-based system, Quốc Ngữ, was developed by 17th-century Portuguese and French missionaries (notably Alexandre de Rhodes) and became the official script in 1920 under French colonial administration.

Quốc Ngữ uses extensive diacritics to mark tones — Vietnamese is tonal, with six distinct tones — and to modify vowels. A single vowel may carry both a vowel diacritic (e.g., the circumflex on ô) and a tone mark (e.g., the dot below in ộ), producing characters with stacked diacritics.

Vietnamese typography for designers

Vietnamese typography is famous for stacked diacritics. Vowels can carry both a base modifier (â, ê, ô, ă, ư, ơ) and one of five tone marks: à (huyền), á (sắc), ả (hỏi), ã (ngã), ạ (nặng). Combinations like ấ, ắ, ầ, ẩ, ẫ, ậ are common. Fonts must support these stacked combinations cleanly, with adequate space above lowercase letters.

Vietnamese line-height needs more vertical space than English to avoid clipping the tall stacked marks. Set line-height to at least 1.5–1.6 for Vietnamese body text. Be Vietnam Pro is a font designed specifically for Vietnamese with optimised diacritic spacing.

Fonts that render Vietnamese well

For web designs targeting Vietnamese-language audiences, these fonts have proven Vietnamese support:

• Be Vietnam Pro
• Inter
• Noto Sans
• Source Sans Pro
• Roboto

Always provide an explicit Vietnamese-supporting font in your CSS font-family stack — relying on browser fallbacks produces inconsistent rendering across operating systems.

Common pitfalls in Vietnamese design

• Tight line-height clipping the top of stacked tone marks
• Fonts that handle isolated diacritics but not stacked combinations (â + sắc = ấ)
• Substituting ASCII fallbacks (a → a, dropping the tone) — completely changes meaning
• Underestimating expansion — Vietnamese is ~30% longer than English
• Confusing đ (Vietnamese D with stroke) with d (regular D)
• Using Latin-only fonts — Vietnamese requires Latin Extended Additional

Localization tips for Vietnamese

• Set line-height to 1.5+ for Vietnamese to accommodate stacked diacritics
• Vietnamese is ~30% longer than English
• Currency: ₫ (Vietnamese đồng); also "VND" in international contexts
• Date format: 15/03/2024 (day-month-year)
• Decimal separator is comma (3,14)
• Family name comes first; given name last (e.g., Nguyễn Văn A)

Why classic Latin Lorem Ipsum doesn't work for Vietnamese

The classic Lorem Ipsum is a corrupted Latin passage from Cicero. It's perfect for Latin-script designs because it produces letter and word lengths that look like real text. But for Vietnamese designs, classic Latin lorem ipsum is the wrong choice:

• It uses slightly different letter frequencies and lacks Vietnamese-specific characters.
• It doesn't reflect how much longer Vietnamese text actually runs in your layout (~30% expansion vs English).
• Designers shown Latin placeholder cannot evaluate the visual rhythm of Vietnamese on the page.
• Stakeholder reviews on Latin lorem ipsum miss layout problems that only surface with native script.

The Vietnamese placeholder above uses real Vietnamese words and characters, so what you see in the mockup is what you'll see in production.

Lorem Ipsum in other languages

Designing for multiple locales? We have placeholder generators for 19 other languages: