Vietnamese language

Vietnamese
Tiếng Việt
Pronunciation[tiəŋ˧˦ viət̚˧˨ʔ] (Hà Nội)
[tiəŋ˦˧˥ viək̚˨˩ʔ] (Huế)
[tiəŋ˦˥ viək̚˨˩˨] ~ [tiəŋ˦˥ jiək̚˨˩˨] (Hồ Chí Minh City)
Native to
EthnicityVietnamese people
Native speakers
85 million (2019)[1]
Early forms
Latin (Vietnamese alphabet)
Vietnamese Braille
Chữ Nôm (historical)
Official status
Official language in
Vietnam
Recognised minority
language in
Regulated byVietnam Academy of Social Sciences
Language codes
ISO 639-1vi
ISO 639-2vie
ISO 639-3vie
Glottologviet1252
Linguasphere46-EBA
Areas within Vietnam with majority Vietnamese speakers, mirroring the ethnic landscape of Vietnam with ethnic Vietnamese dominating around the lowland pale of the country.[4]
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This article contains Vietnamese text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of chữ Nôm, chữ Hán and chữ Quốc ngữ.

Vietnamese (tiếng Việt) is an Austroasiatic language spoken primarily in Vietnam where it is the official language. Vietnamese is spoken natively by around 85 million people,[1] several times as many as the rest of the Austroasiatic family combined.[5] It is the native language of ethnic Vietnamese (Kinh), as well as the second or first language for other ethnicities of Vietnam, and used by Vietnamese diaspora in the world.

Like many languages in Southeast Asia and East Asia, Vietnamese is highly analytic and is tonal. It has head-initial directionality, with subject–verb–object order and modifiers following the words they modify. It also uses noun classifiers. Its vocabulary has had significant influence from Middle Chinese and loanwords from French.[6] Although it is often mistakenly thought as being an monosyllabic language, Vietnamese words typically consist of from one to many as eight individual morphemes or syllables; the majority of Vietnamese vocabulary are disyllabic and trisyllabic words.[7]

Vietnamese is written using the Vietnamese alphabet (chữ Quốc ngữ). The alphabet is based on the Latin script and was officially adopted in the early 20th century during French rule of Vietnam. It uses digraphs and diacritics to mark tones and some phonemes. Vietnamese was historically written using chữ Nôm, a logographic script using Chinese characters (chữ Hán) to represent Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and some native Vietnamese words, together with many locally invented characters representing other words.[8][9]

  1. ^ a b Vietnamese at Ethnologue (27th ed., 2024) Closed access icon
  2. ^ "Česko má nové oficiální národnostní menšiny. Vietnamce a Bělorusy". 3 July 2013.
  3. ^ "Slovakia: Vietnamese community granted national minority status | European Website on Integration". 7 June 2023.
  4. ^ From Ethnologue (2009, 2013)
  5. ^ Driem, George van (2001). Languages of the Himalayas, Volume One. BRILL. p. 264. ISBN 90-04-12062-9. Of the approximately 90 millions speakers of Austroasiatic languages, over 70 million speak Vietnamese, nearly ten million speak Khmer and roughly five million speak Santali.
  6. ^ Scholvin, Vera; Meinschaefer, Judith (2018). "The integration of French loanwords into Vietnamese: A corpus-based analysis of tonal, syllabic and segmental aspects". Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society.
  7. ^ Thompson, Laurence C. (January 17, 1963). "The Problem of the Word in Vietnamese". WORD. 19 (1): 39–52. doi:10.1080/00437956.1963.11659787 – via CrossRef.
  8. ^ "Vietnamese literature". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2019-04-13.
  9. ^ Li, Yu (2020). The Chinese Writing System in Asia: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Routledge. pp. 102–103. ISBN 978-1-00-069906-7.