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There is no trend toward increased use of diacritics
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# So why do U.S. publishers drop Vietnamese diacritics? It's because, "the number of accent marks can be distracting," according to the style guide of ''National Geographic''.<ref>''[http://stylemanual.ngs.org/home/A/accent-marks National Geographic Style Manual]''. "Although Vietnamese is written in the Latin alphabet, the number of accent marks can be distracting and may therefore be omitted."</ref> This publication has a great deal of experience with a wide variety of diacritics. Style should be as unremarkable as possible so that readers can focus on content.
 
# So why do U.S. publishers drop Vietnamese diacritics? It's because, "the number of accent marks can be distracting," according to the style guide of ''National Geographic''.<ref>''[http://stylemanual.ngs.org/home/A/accent-marks National Geographic Style Manual]''. "Although Vietnamese is written in the Latin alphabet, the number of accent marks can be distracting and may therefore be omitted."</ref> This publication has a great deal of experience with a wide variety of diacritics. Style should be as unremarkable as possible so that readers can focus on content.
 
# Who still puts Vietnamese diacritics in English-language material? Not anyone who could be considered a style model. Besides Wikipedia,<ref>Vietnam-related titles were moved to diacritic forms ''en masse'' soon after I was banned.</ref> there's Thế Giới Publishers in Hanoi. Much of the material this company puts out is old-style war propaganda. Tourists can buy it and show the goofy language and lettering to their friends back home. In "patriotic-language" publications of this type, Vietnam is "Việt Nam," Hanoi is "Hà Nội," and mainstream English has been left far behind.
 
# Who still puts Vietnamese diacritics in English-language material? Not anyone who could be considered a style model. Besides Wikipedia,<ref>Vietnam-related titles were moved to diacritic forms ''en masse'' soon after I was banned.</ref> there's Thế Giới Publishers in Hanoi. Much of the material this company puts out is old-style war propaganda. Tourists can buy it and show the goofy language and lettering to their friends back home. In "patriotic-language" publications of this type, Vietnam is "Việt Nam," Hanoi is "Hà Nội," and mainstream English has been left far behind.
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#Some publishers did experiment with increased use of diacritics use after Unicode was introduced. But that trend has now reversed. ''Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War'' was originally published in 1998 with diacritics. But these have been removed from the current (2011) edition of the work. [http://news.chinhphu.vn VGP News] once had diacritics, but switched to conventional English about two years ago. The print edition of ''Viet Nam News'' still uses diacritics. This was once a major news source, but it disappeared from newsstands years ago.<ref>They still hand out copies of VNN to passengers who request it on Vietnam Air. Otherwise, the print edition doesn't have any circulation worth mentioning</ref> Nowadays, almost all of VNN's readers access [http://vietnamnews.vn/ the website], which is diacritics-free.  
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#'''There is no trend toward increased use of diacritics.''' Yes, some publishers did experiment with them after Unicode was introduced. But, if anything, the trend has been the other direction in the last ten years. ''Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War'' was originally published in 1998 with diacritics. But these have been removed from the current (2011) edition of the work. [http://news.chinhphu.vn VGP News] once had diacritics, but switched to conventional English about two years ago. The print edition of ''Viet Nam News'' still uses diacritics. This was once a major news source, but it disappeared from newsstands years ago.<ref>They still hand out copies of VNN to passengers who request it on Vietnam Air. Otherwise, the print edition doesn't have any circulation worth mentioning</ref> Nowadays, almost all of VNN's readers access [http://vietnamnews.vn/ the website], which is diacritics-free.  
    
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