ABSTRACT
There are three main groups of native languages in Indo-China, namely, Annamite, Khmer and Thai. Although French is the official language, all three of these groups also have some status: European missionaries who visited the country in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the first to transcribe the Annamite, Khmer and Thai scripts into the Roman alphabet. They used a phonetic system, with diacritical marks to indicate tone, aspiration and unpronounced letters. The work of the missionaries has formed the basis of the qu' oc ng'u or romanized Annamite script which is officially used to-day in Annam, Tonkin and Cochin-China. Their work has also been the basis of the romanized script for the Khmer and Thai languages.
