Fonts that support Vietnamese
Open-license families that include the stacked diacritics Vietnamese needs, among them several designed in or for Vietnam.
Xin chao Viet Nam
Vietnamese is written in the Latin alphabet, but it asks more of a font than any other major Latin-script language. The language is tonal, and its writing marks both vowel quality and tone. A single vowel can carry two marks at once, for example a circumflex with an acute above it, and there are 134 accented letters in all, counting capitals and lowercase. A typeface without them cannot set even a short Vietnamese sentence; missing letters fall back to another font and the word breaks apart visually.
Support is therefore a yes-or-no matter first, and the records here answer it: every family below contains the letters required for Vietnamese. Quality is the second question. Stacked marks need room, so look at how the double diacritics are drawn. Good designs keep the marks compact and well balanced over the vowel, adjust their size on capitals, and do not let them collide with the line above. Set a paragraph with normal line spacing and look for clashes; Vietnamese text generally wants a little more leading than English.
Several families in this collection come from Vietnamese designers or were drawn from Vietnamese street lettering, and their records say so.
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Be Vietnam Pro
Vietnamese diacritics were drawn as a priority, in nine weights with italics.
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Mulish
A minimalist sans for text and display with Vietnamese on a weight axis from 200 to 1000, with italics.
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Plus Jakarta Sans
A geometric sans with Vietnamese in seven weights with italics.
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Space Grotesk
Vietnamese in a quirky sans variable from Light to Bold.
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Bricolage Grotesque
Vietnamese in a grotesque with optical size, weight and width axes.
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Kanit
Vietnamese beside Thai, in nine weights with italics.
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Cormorant Garamond
A light display serif with Vietnamese, in five weights with italics.
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Inconsolata
A monospace with Vietnamese, variable in weight and width.
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Darker Grotesque
A contemporary grotesque from Vietnam, variable from Light to Black.
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Xanh Mono
A high-contrast serif monospace from a Vietnamese foundry, with a true italic.
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Dancing Script
A casual script with Vietnamese, on a weight axis from 400 to 700.
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Vina Sans
A condensed display face modeled on Vietnamese street signs, flyers and posters.
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Viaoda Libre
A display serif inspired by Vietnamese cultural symbolism, with hairlines and curled ascenders; its makers say work on the Vietnamese continues.
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Freeman
A heavy condensed gothic for headlines whose notes list full Vietnamese among 1,571 glyphs.
Samples load a basic Latin subset of each family. Every family here carries an open license; its page states the terms and offers the original files.
Questions about fonts that support Vietnamese
Why do some fonts fail on Vietnamese text?
Vietnamese uses many vowels with two diacritics stacked together. Fonts without those precomposed letters show boxes or switch to a fallback font for single characters.
Is a font with Latin Extended enough for Vietnamese?
Not necessarily. Most Vietnamese letters with stacked marks are encoded in a separate Unicode block, Latin Extended Additional, and web font services deliver them as their own "vietnamese" subset. Check for that subset, and for the letters o and u with horn.
Does Vietnamese need more line spacing?
Often a little, because marks stack above capitals and tall letters. Test with real text and increase the line height until no marks touch the line above.
Are these fonts free for commercial use in Vietnam and elsewhere?
Yes. All of them are under the SIL Open Font License, which applies worldwide and allows commercial use, embedding and modification.