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The Vietnam News

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Vietnam adopts uniform computer coding standard for Vietnamese language

HANOI, Vietnam - Vietnam's government has adopted a uniform system for representing the Vietnamese language in computers, replacing several incompatible systems currently in use, an official said Wednesday.

As of the beginning of next year, all government and ruling Communist Party agencies will use the Unicode standard, according to a decision signed Monday by Deputy Prime Minister Pham Gia Khiem, the official said. Unicode is a 16-bit character encoding system which contains all of the characters in common use in the world's major languages, including Vietnamese. ASCII, an earlier system still widely used for encoding Western languages, uses only 7 bits of data for each character, which restricts the total number of characters it can represent.

Currently, several different computer coding systems are used to represent Vietnamese letters. The most common include VNI, VPS, VISCII, TCVN (ABC) and Unicode. Although the Vietnamese language uses Roman letters, it also uses special markings which are added to the letters to designate vowel variations and tones. Individuals and private businesses will not be required to use Unicode, but will be strongly encouraged to do so, said the official of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment.

The government will also urge Communist Party and government agencies to convert archival documents which use other codings to Unicode, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Associated Press - June 12, 2002