Lets say that a non French power colonized Vietnam. How would that affect Vietnam culturally, economically and demographically? How would the alternate timeline differ from OTL(French Vietnam).
Some potential colonizers are:
Germany
Great Britian
Italy
Japan
Netherlands
Portogal
Spain
Well for one thing, the French were adamant about pushing the Latinized script developed by Jesuit missionaries centuries earlier. From the wiki on the Vietnamese alphabet:
“Later on, under French rule in the late 19th century, missionaries often saw the Confucian literati as the main obstacle to Catholic conversion in Vietnam, hence the elimination of the Chinese language was also regarded as a means for isolating Vietnam from its heritage, and instrumental in neutralizing its traditional elite.
[7] Historian Pamela A. Pears asserted that the French, by instituting the Roman alphabet in Vietnam, cut the Vietnamese off from their traditional literature, rendering them unable to read it.
[8] The French colonial authorities adopted the quoc ngu romanized phonetic script in Cochin China as early as 1860 with a view to breaking the links to the Chinese writing tradition the local elites had used, cutting off new generations from their previous literature and, as a colonial official put it, "expose the Vietnamese only to French" influence.
[9]Accordingly, another aim of the newly established French educational system in
Indochina consisted of creating a French-speaking and French-writing acculturated indigenous elite prone to serve the colonial rulers in the administration.
[10]
The French colonial education system was based in the east of Indochina,
[11] and in that context the
Tonkin Free School flourished fleetingly, set up by nationalists in 1907, and adopting the alphabetic script. By 1917, the Confucian examination system was suppressed, so convincing the Vietnamese elites of the need to educate their offspring in the French language education system.
[12] That, however, did not satisfy the ruling French, who demanded exclusive educational establishments.
[13] The colonial regime then came up with the idea of setting up an educational system for natives with quoc nguVietnamese as first language in primary school, but French as second language, via quoc ngu. Hundred of thousands of text books for primary education began to be published in quoc ngu, with the result of unintentionally turning the script into the popular medium for the expression of Vietnamese culture. By the late 1930s, approximately 10% of the population was literate, a huge increase over several decades before.
[13] However, the expansion of this alphabet was not without conflict with other peoples inhabiting Indochina, like the
Khmer Krom.[
citation needed]”
So who knows if another power would care as much. We might end up with Vietnam retaining Chinese influenced scripts.