Short stories written in quốc ngữ (lit. national language script), or Romanised characters to record the Vietnamese language, in Nam Bộ, or Cochinchina, were started late in the 19th, then encountered an interruption and were continuously developed afterwards early in the 20th century. The transformation from traditional folk tales to modern short stories of artistic character, they included works inspired with ethics and preaching and those reflecting vividly the real life. The short stories made no small contributions to the modernisation of the genre in particular and Vietnam’s national literature in general. | Short Stories in Romanised National Language Script in Southern Vietnam Early in Twentieth Century Tran Van Trong1 1 Vietnam Institute of Lexicography and Encyclopedia, Viet Nam Academy of Social Sciences. Email: tranvantrong9683@ Received: 11 April 2017. Accepted: 10 May 2017. Abstract: Short stories written in quốc ngữ (lit. national language script), or Romanised characters to record the Vietnamese language, in Nam Bộ, or Cochinchina, were started late in the 19th, then encountered an interruption and were continuously developed afterwards early in the 20 th century. The transformation from traditional folk tales to modern short stories of artistic character, they included works inspired with ethics and preaching and those reflecting vividly the real life. The short stories made no small contributions to the modernisation of the genre in particular and Vietnam’s national literature in general. Keywords: Literature in Romanised script of Vietnamese, short stories in Romanised script of Vietnamese, modernisation of literature, Cochinchina. Subject classification: Literature 1. Introduction In Southern Vietnam, the literature written in the Romanised script of Vietnamese emerged initially in the late 19th century, but it did not develop continuously until the early 20th (there was an interruption of over a decade in the late 19th century). Later on, from the beginning of the 20th century till the early 1930s, it was developing incessantly with hundreds of works in various genres, such as poetry, drama, short stories, novels, memoirs and chronicles, etc. In the field of prose, short stories and novels were written at the earliest. It is the central genre of the modern literature. The emergence of the Romanised script short stories particularly and the prose generally in Southern Vietnam was closely attached to the popularisation of the Romanised script and the emergence of the first Vietnamese-language newspaper titled “Gia Định báo” (Gia Dinh .
