[4] Differences in phonology of the various local Tai languages, the isolation of communities and the fact that the written language has traditionally been passed down from father to son have led to many local variants.

Together with Vietnamese researchers, a first proposal called Thống Nhất (or Unified Alphabet) was developed, which was published in 1961 and revised in 1966.

[7] The script uses Latin script punctuation, and also includes five special characters, one to indicate a person, one for the number "one", one to repeat the previous word, one to mark the beginning of a text and one to mark the end of a text.

[11] A Unicode subcommittee reviewed a February 6, 2007 proposal submitted by James Brase of SIL International for what was then called Tay Viet script.

[12] At the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 meeting on April 24, 2007, a revised proposal[7] for the script, now known as Tai Viet, was accepted "as is", with support[13] from TCVN, the Vietnam Quality & Standards Centre.

Tai Viet was added to the Unicode Standard in October, 2009 with the release of version 5.2.