Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Vietnam/Style Guidelines

Spelling of Vietnamese place names

Can I raise the issue of the use of accented Vietnamese spelling in historical articles related to Vietnam? I am the author of a series of articles on the nineteenth-century French colonial campaigns in Vietnam, notably the battles of the 1860s Cochinchina Campaign and the 1880s Sino-French War, and I have noticed a tendency for contributors to convert the place names I use in these articles into Vietnamese spelling. This can sometimes make it difficult to locate an article, especially if the title is altered in this way, and the accents are in any case meaningless to non-Vietnamese speakers. This is supposed to be an encyclopedia written in English, not Vietnamese. It seems to me that there is no place for Vietnamese spelling in historical articles, except perhaps to gloss the key word in the article.

For example, one of the articles I have written on the Cochinchina Campaign is presently entitled Capture of Vĩnh Long. I find it almost impossible to refer to this article when I consult Wikipedia, because I'm never sure how Vinh Long is spelled in Vietnamese, so have to refer to the template for the Cochinchina campaign before I can find it. Surely the article should be retitled 'Capture of Vinh Long'. The default spelling should be Vinh Long, as that is how the town's name is normally spelled in English atlases, and there should be only one Vietnamese gloss, in the first sentence of the article. Thus: The capture of Vinh Long (Vietnamese: Vĩnh Long) was an important French victory, etc.

This would be in accordance with the practice suggested for geographical articles, where the name of a Vietnamese town is first given in its normal English spelling, then glossed in the teng viet style.

What do fellow-contributors think?

Djwilms (talk) 09:07, 15 July 2009 (UTC)