Spoken and written Vietnamese today uses the Latin script-based Vietnamese alphabet to represent Vietnamese words which are of Chinese origin (Hán-Việt, or Sino-Vietnamese), native Vietnamese words (thuần Việt), and other foreign loanwords. Historic Vietnamese literature was written by scholars in Nôm and before that Hán (Chinese characters). During ancient times, the ancestors of the Vietnamese were considered to have been Proto-Austroasiatic (also called Proto-Mon–Khmer) speaking people, possibly traced to the ancient Dong Son culture. Modern linguists describe Vietnamese as having lost some Proto-Austroasiatic phonological and morphological features that the original Vietnamese language had. This was noted in the linguistic separation of Vietnamese from Vietnamese-Muong roughly one thousand years ago. From 111 BC up to the 20th century, Vietnamese literature was written in Văn ngôn (Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese), using Chữ Hán (Chinese characters) and then also Nôm from the 10th century to 20th century (Chinese characters adapted for vernacular Vietnamese). Chữ Nôm began to be used as early as the 8th century in prose fiction and poetry in Vietnamese and had gained widespread use by the 10th century. It was formalized under the Hồ and the Tây Sơn Dynasties. Chữ Nôm used Chữ Hán for Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and an adapted set of characters to transcribe native Vietnamese, with Vietnamese approximations of Middle Chinese pronunciations. The two concurrent scripts existed until the era of French Indochina when the Latin alphabet chữ quốc ngữ gradually became the current written medium of literature. In the past, Sanskrit and Indic texts also contributed to Vietnamese literature either from religious ideas from Mahayana Buddhism, or from historical influence of Champa and Khmer. Terminology In Vietnamese, Chinese characters go by several names, but all refer to the same script: Chữ Hán (𡨸漢): "words of Hán", same meaning as Hán tự. Hán tự (漢字): "Hán characters/words"; also pronounced as Hanzi in Standard Chinese, Hanja in Korean, and Kanji in Japanese. Hán văn (漢文): "Han writing" or "Han literature", also pronounced as Hanwen in Standard Chinese, Hanmun in Korean, and Kanbun in Japanese. Meaning Classical Chinese. Chữ Nho (𡨸儒 "words of Confucians"). The Vietnamese word chữ 𡨸 (character, script, writing, letter) is derived from a Middle Chinese pronunciation of 字 (Modern Mandarin Chinese in Pinyin: zì), meaning 'character'. Sino-Vietnamese (Vietnamese: từ Hán Việt 詞漢越 "Sino-Vietnamese words") refer to cognates or terms borrowed from Chinese into the Vietnamese language, usually preserving the phonology of the original Chinese that