Vietnamese language


Vietnamese is an Austroasiatic language that originated in Vietnam, where it is the national and official language. Spoken natively by an estimated 95 million people, it is the native language of the Vietnamese people, as well as a first or second language for ethnic groups in Vietnam. Vietnamese speakers are also found in Southeast Asia, East Asia, North America, Australia and Europe. Vietnamese has been officially recognized as a minority language in the Czech Republic.
Vietnamese is a Austroasiatic language with currently the most speakers. Its vocabulary has borrowings from Chinese, French, and English. Vietnamese used to use Chinese characters and a script called Chữ Nôm which was based on Chinese charcters, but used newly invented characters for native Vietnamese words. The Vietnamese alphabet uses the Latin alphabet with diacritics for tones and pronunciation.

Geographic distribution

As the national language, Vietnamese is spoken by practically by everyone in Vietnam. It is also spoken by the Gin traditionally residing on three islands off Dongxing in southern Guangxi Province, China. A significant number of Vietnamese speakers also reside in neighboring Cambodia and Laos.
In the United States, Vietnamese is the fifth most spoken language, with over 1.5 million speakers, who are concentrated in a handful of states. It is the third most spoken language in Texas and Washington; fourth in Georgia, Louisiana, and Virginia; and fifth in Arkansas and California. Vietnamese is the seventh most spoken language in Australia. In France, it is the most spoken Asian language and the eighth most spoken immigrant language at home.

Official status

Vietnamese is the sole official and national language of Vietnam. It is the first language of the majority of the Vietnamese population, as well as a first or second language for the country's ethnic minority groups.
In the Czech Republic, Vietnamese has been recognized as one of 14 minority languages, on the basis of communities that have resided in the country either traditionally or on a long-term basis. This status grants the Vietnamese community in the country a representative on the Government Council for Nationalities, an advisory body of the Czech Government for matters of policy towards national minorities and their members. It also grants the community the right to use Vietnamese with public authorities and in courts anywhere in the country.

As a foreign language

Vietnamese is increasingly being taught in schools and institutions outside of Vietnam. In countries with strongly established Vietnamese-speaking communities such as Australia, Canada, France, and the United States, Vietnamese language education largely serves as a cultural role to link descendants of Vietnamese immigrants to their ancestral culture. Meanwhile, in countries near Vietnam such as Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, the increased role of Vietnamese in foreign language education is largely due to the growth and influence of Vietnam's economy.
Since the 1980s, Vietnamese language schools have been established for youth in many Vietnamese-speaking communities around the world, notably in the United States.
Historic and stronger trade and diplomatic relations with Vietnam and a growing interest among the French Vietnamese population of their ancestral culture have also led to an increasing number of institutions in France, including universities, to offer formal courses in the language.
Since the late 1980s, the Vietnamese German community has enlisted the support of city governments to bring Vietnamese into high school curricula for the purpose of teaching and reminding Vietnamese German students of their mother-tongue. Furthermore, there has also been a number of Germans studying Vietnamese due to increased economic investment in Vietnam.
Vietnamese is taught in schools in the form of dual immersion to a varying degree in Cambodia, Laos, and the United States. Classes teach students subjects in Vietnamese and another language. Furthermore, in Thailand, Vietnamese is one of the most popular foreign languages in schools and colleges..

Linguistic classification

Early linguistic work some 150 years ago already classified Vietnamese as belonging to the Mon–Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic language family. Later, Muong was found to be more closely related to Vietnamese than other Mon–Khmer languages, and a Viet–Muong subgrouping was established, also including Thavung, Chut, Cuoi, etc. The term "Vietic" was proposed by Hayes, who proposed to redefine Viet–Muong as referring to a subbranch of Vietic containing only Vietnamese and Muong. The term "Vietic" is used, among others, by Gérard Diffloth, with a slightly different proposal on subclassification, within which the term "Viet–Muong" refers to a lower subgrouping consisting of Vietnamese dialects, Muong dialects, and Nguồn.

Lexicon

As a result of the historical period of Vietnam under Chinese rule, and consequent influence from China as a neighbour as an independent state, Vietnamese lexicon received a two-fold layer of integration of Chinese words from Middle Chinese and from Literary Chinese into Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary.
Other borrowings, such as those from the Cham language, were due to inter-trading between the two groups and from Vietnam's annexation of the Champa Kingdom, which absorbed the Champa's Indianized culture, creating Central Vietnam. The same happened to the South-East section of the Khmer Kingdom, creating South Vietnam.
Additionally, from the French presence in Vietnam to the 1954 Geneva Conference, Vietnamese has been influenced by 177 years of the French language. For example, the word 'cà phê' is derived from the French word 'café'.
Nowadays, many new words are being added to the language's lexicon due to influence from the Western World; for example 'TV' is written as 'tivi'. Sometimes these words are calques translated into Vietnamese. Some calques are multi-syllabic, e.g. Campuchia.

Phonology

Vowels

Vietnamese has a large number of vowels. Below is a vowel diagram of Hanoian Vietnamese :
Front and central vowels are unrounded, whereas the back vowels are rounded. The vowels â and ă are pronounced very short, much shorter than the other vowels. Thus, ơ and â are basically pronounced the same except that ơ is of normal length while â is short – the same applies to the vowels long a and short ă.
The centering diphthongs are formed with only the three high vowels. They are generally spelled as ia, ưa, ua when they end a word and are spelled iê, ươ, uô, respectively, when they are followed by a consonant.
In addition to single vowels and centering diphthongs, Vietnamese has closing diphthongs and triphthongs. The closing diphthongs and triphthongs consist of a main vowel component followed by a shorter semivowel offglide or. There are restrictions on the high offglides: cannot occur after a front vowel nucleus and cannot occur after a back vowel nucleus.
The correspondence between the orthography and pronunciation is complicated. For example, the offglide is usually written as i; however, it may also be represented with y. In addition, in the diphthongs and the letters y and i also indicate the pronunciation of the main vowel: ay = ă +, ai = a +. Thus, tay "hand" is while tai "ear" is. Similarly, u and o indicate different pronunciations of the main vowel: au = ă +, ao = a +. Thus, thau "brass" is while thao "raw silk" is.

Consonants

The consonants that occur in Vietnamese are listed below in the Vietnamese orthography with the phonetic pronunciation to the right.
Some consonant sounds are written with only one letter, other consonant sounds are written with a digraph, and others are written with more than one letter or digraph.
Not all dialects of Vietnamese have the same consonant in a given word. See the [|language variation section] for further elaboration.
The analysis of syllable-final orthographic ch and nh in Hanoi Vietnamese has had different analyses. One analysis has final ch, nh as being phonemes contrasting with syllable-final t, c and n, ng and identifies final ch with the syllable-initial ch. The other analysis has final ch and nh as predictable allophonic variants of the velar phonemes and that occur after the upper front vowels i and ê ; although they also occur after a, but in such cases are believed to have resulted from an earlier e which diphthongized to ai.

Tones

Each Vietnamese syllable is pronounced with an inherent tone, centered on the main vowel or group of vowels. Tones differ in:
Tone is indicated by diacritics written above or below the vowel. The six tones in the northern varieties, with their self-referential Vietnamese names, are:
NameDescriptionDiacriticExampleSample vowel
ngang 'level'mid levelma 'ghost'
huyền 'deep'low falling mà 'but'
sắc 'sharp'high rising má 'cheek, mother '
hỏi 'asking'mid dipping-rising mả 'tomb, grave'
ngã 'tumbling'high breaking-rising mã 'horse, code'
nặng 'heavy'low falling constricted mạ 'rice seedling'

Other dialects of Vietnamese have fewer tones.
In Vietnamese poetry, tones are classed into two groups:
Tone groupTones within tone group
bằng "level, flat"ngang and huyền
trắc "oblique, sharp"sắc, hỏi, ngã, and nặng

Words with tones belonging to a particular tone group must occur in certain positions within the poetic verse.
Vietnamese Catholics practice a distinctive style of prayer recitation called đọc kinh, in which each tone is assigned a specific note or sequence of notes.

Language variation

The Vietnamese language has several mutually intelligible regional varieties. The five main dialects are as follows:
Dialect regionLocalitiesNames under French colonization
Northern VietnameseHanoi, Haiphong, Red River Delta, Northwest and NortheastTonkinese
North-central VietnameseThanh Hoá, Nghệ An, Hà TĩnhAnnamese
Mid-Central VietnameseQuảng Bình, Quảng Trị, Huế, Thừa ThiênAnnamese
South-Central Vietnamese Đà Nẵng, Quảng Nam, Quảng Ngãi, Bình Định, Phú Yên, Nha TrangAnnamese
Southern VietnameseBà Rịa-Vũng Tàu, Ho Chi Minh City, Lâm Đồng, Mekong DeltaCochinchinese

Vietnamese has traditionally been divided into three dialect regions: North, Central, and South. However, Michel Ferlus and Nguyễn Tài Cẩn offer evidence for considering a North-Central region separate from Central. The term Haut-Annam refers to dialects spoken from northern Nghệ An Province to southern Thừa Thiên Province that preserve archaic features that have been lost in other modern dialects.
These dialect regions differ mostly in their sound systems, but also in vocabulary and grammar. The North-central and Central regional varieties, which have a significant amount of vocabulary differences, are generally less mutually intelligible to Northern and Southern speakers. There is less internal variation within the Southern region than the other regions due to its relatively late settlement by Vietnamese speakers. The North-central region is particularly conservative; its pronunciation has diverged less from Vietnamese orthography than the other varieties, which tend to merge certain sounds. Along the coastal areas, regional variation has been neutralized to a certain extent, while more mountainous regions preserve more variation. As for sociolinguistic attitudes, the North-central varieties are often felt to be "peculiar" or "difficult to understand" by speakers of other dialects, despite the fact that their pronunciation fits the written language the most closely; this is typically because of various words in their vocabulary which are unfamiliar to other speakers.
The large movements of people between North and South beginning in the mid-20th century and continuing to this day have resulted in a sizeable number of Southern residents speaking in the Northern accent/dialect and, to a greater extent, Northern residents speaking in the Southern accent/dialect. Following the Geneva Accords of 1954 that called for the temporary division of the country, about a million northerners moved south as part of Operation Passage to Freedom. About 3% of that number of people made the move in the reverse direction
Following the reunification of Vietnam in 1975, Northern and North-Central speakers from the densely populated Red River Delta and the traditionally poorer provinces of Nghệ An, Hà Tĩnh and Quảng Bình have continued to move South to look for better economic opportunities, beginning with the new government's "New Economic Zones program" which lasted from 1975–85. The first half of the program, resulted in 1.3 million people sent to the New Economic Zones, majority of which were relocated in the southern half of the country in previously uninhabited areas, of which 550,000 were Northerners. The second half saw almost 1 million Northerners relocated to the NEZs. As well, government and military personnel, many from Northern and north-central Vietnam, are posted to various locations throughout the country, often away from their home regions. More recently, the growth of the free market system has resulted in business people and tourists traveling to distant parts of Vietnam. These movements have resulted in some blending of dialects, but more significantly, have made the Northern dialect more easily understood in the South and vice versa. Most Southerners, when singing modern/old popular Vietnamese songs or addressing the public, do so in the Standardised accent if possible. This is true in Vietnam as well as in overseas Vietnamese communities.

Vocabulary

Consonants

The syllable-initial ch and tr digraphs are pronounced distinctly in North-Central, Central, and Southern varieties, but are merged in Northern varieties. The North-Central varieties preserve three distinct pronunciations for d, gi, and r whereas the North has a three-way merger and the Central and South have a merger of d and gi while keeping r distinct. At the end of syllables, palatals ch and nh have merged with alveolars t and n, which, in turn, have also partially merged with velars c and ng in Central and Southern varieties.
In addition to the regional variation described above, there is a merger of l and n in certain rural varieties in the North:
Orthography"Mainstream" varietiesRural varieties
n
l

Variation between l and n can be found even in mainstream Vietnamese in certain words. For example, the numeral "five" appears as năm by itself and in compound numerals like năm mươi "fifty" but appears as lăm in mười lăm "fifteen". In some northern varieties, this numeral appears with an initial nh instead of l: hai mươi nhăm "twenty-five", instead of mainstream hai mươi lăm.
There is also a merger of r and g in certain rural varieties in the South:
Orthography"Mainstream" varietiesRural varieties
r
g

The consonant clusters that were originally present in Middle Vietnamese have been lost in almost all modern Vietnamese varieties. However, some speech communities have preserved some of these archaic clusters: "sky" is blời with a cluster in Hảo Nho but trời in Southern Vietnamese and giời in Hanoi Vietnamese.

Tones

Generally, the Northern varieties have six tones while those in other regions have five tones. The hỏi and ngã tones are distinct in North and some North-central varieties but have merged in Central, Southern, and some North-Central varieties. Some North-Central varieties have a merger of the ngã and nặng tones while keeping the hỏi tone distinct. Still, other North-Central varieties have a three-way merger of hỏi, ngã, and nặng resulting in a four-tone system. In addition, there are several phonetic differences in the tones among dialects.
The table above shows the pitch contour of each tone using Chao tone number notation ; glottalization is indicated with the symbol; murmured voice with ; glottal stop with ; sub-dialectal variants are separated with commas.

Grammar

Vietnamese, like Chinese and many languages in Southeast Asia, is an analytic language. Vietnamese does not use morphological marking of case, gender, number or tense. Also like other languages in the region, Vietnamese syntax conforms to subject–verb–object word order, is head-initial, and has a noun classifier system. Additionally, it is pro-drop, wh-in-situ, and allows verb serialization.
Some Vietnamese sentences with English word glosses and translations are provided below.

Dates and numbers writing formats

Vietnameses speak date in the format " ". Each month's name is just the ordinal of that month appended after the word tháng, which means "month". Traditional Vietnamese however assigns other names to some months; these names are mostly used in the lunar calendar and in poetry.
When written in the short form, "DD/MM/YYYY" is preferred. Historically, the Vietnamese order was the same as Chinese, Korean and Japanese, but it changed because of French influence in the 20th century. Today, the latter format is still comprehensible by most Vietnamese.
Example:
The Vietnamese prefer writing numbers with a comma as the decimal separator in lieu of dots, and either spaces or dots to group the digits. An example is 1 629,15. Because a comma is used as the decimal separator, a semicolon is used to separate two numbers instead.

Writing systems

Up to the late 19th century, two writing systems based on Chinese characters were used in Vietnam.
All formal writing, including government business, scholarship and formal literature, was done in Classical Chinese.
Folk literature in Vietnamese was recorded using the chữ Nôm script, in which many Chinese characters were borrowed and many more modified and invented to represent native Vietnamese words. Created in the 13th century or earlier, the Nôm writing reached its zenith in the 18th century when many Vietnamese writers and poets composed their works in Nôm, most notably Nguyễn Du and Hồ Xuân Hương.
However it was only used for official purposes during the brief Hồ and Tây Sơn dynasties.
A Vietnamese Catholic, Nguyễn Trường Tộ, sent petitions to the Court which suggested a Chinese character-based syllabary which would be used for Vietnamese sounds; however, his petition failed. The French colonial administration sought to eliminate the Chinese writing system, Confucianism, and other Chinese influences from Vietnam by getting rid of Nôm.
A romanization of Vietnamese was codified in the 17th century by the French Jesuit missionary Alexandre de Rhodes, based on works of earlier Portuguese missionaries Gaspar do Amaral and António Barbosa. This Vietnamese alphabet was gradually expanded from its initial domain in Christian writing to become more popular among the general public.
However, the Romanized script did not come to predominate until the beginning of the 20th century, when education became widespread and a simpler writing system was found more expedient for teaching and communication with the general population.
Under French Indochina colonial rule, French superseded Chinese in administration.
Vietnamese written with the alphabet became required for all public documents in 1910 by issue of a decree by the French Résident Supérieur of the protectorate of Tonkin. By the middle of the 20th century virtually all writing was done in chữ quốc ngữ, which became the official script on independence. Chữ nho was still in use on early North Vietnamese and late French Indochinese banknotes issued after World War II, but fell out of official use shortly thereafter.
Only a few scholars and some extremely elderly people are able to read chữ Nôm today. In China, members of the Jing minority still write in chữ Nôm.
Changes in the script were made by French scholars and administrators and by conferences held after independence during 1954–1974. The script now reflects a so-called Middle Vietnamese dialect that has vowels and final consonants most similar to northern dialects and initial consonants most similar to southern dialects. This Middle Vietnamese is presumably close to the Hanoi variety as spoken sometime after 1600 but before the present.

Computer support

The Unicode character set contains all Vietnamese characters and the Vietnamese currency symbol. On systems that do not support Unicode, many 8-bit Vietnamese code pages are available such as Vietnamese Standard Code for Information Interchange or Windows-1258. Where ASCII must be used, Vietnamese letters are often typed using the VIQR convention, though this is largely unnecessary with the increasing ubiquity of Unicode. There are many software tools that help type true Vietnamese text on US keyboards, such as and on Windows, or on Macintosh.

History

It seems likely that in the distant past, Vietnamese shared more characteristics common to other languages in the Austroasiatic family, such as an inflectional morphology and a richer set of consonant clusters, which have subsequently disappeared from the language. However, Vietnamese appears to have been heavily influenced by its location in the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, with the result that it has acquired or converged toward characteristics such as isolating morphology and phonemically distinctive tones, through processes of tonogenesis. These characteristics have become part of many of the genetically unrelated languages of Southeast Asia; for example, Tsat, and Vietnamese each developed tones as a phonemic feature. The ancestor of the Vietnamese language is usually believed to have been originally based in the area of the Red River Delta in what is now northern Vietnam.
Distinctive tonal variations emerged during the subsequent expansion of the Vietnamese language and people into what is now central and southern Vietnam through conquest of the ancient nation of Champa and the Khmer people of the Mekong Delta in the vicinity of present-day Ho Chi Minh City, also known as Saigon.
Vietnamese was primarily influenced by Chinese, which came to predominate politically in the 2nd century BC. After Vietnam achieved independence in the 10th century, the ruling class adopted Classical Chinese as the medium of government, scholarship and literature. With the dominance of Chinese came radical importation of Chinese vocabulary and grammatical influence. A portion of the Vietnamese lexicon in all realms consists of Sino-Vietnamese words
When France invaded Vietnam in the late 19th century, French gradually replaced Chinese as the official language in education and government. Vietnamese adopted many French terms, such as đầm, ga, sơ mi, and búp bê. In addition, many Sino-Vietnamese terms were devised for Western ideas imported through the French.
Henri Maspero described six periods of the Vietnamese language:
  1. Pre-Vietnamese, also known as Proto-Viet–Muong or Proto-Vietnamuong, the ancestor of Vietnamese and the related Muong language.
  2. Proto-Vietnamese, the oldest reconstructable version of Vietnamese, dated to just before the entry of massive amounts of Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary into the language, c. 7th to 9th century AD? At this state, the language had three tones.
  3. Archaic Vietnamese, the state of the language upon adoption of the Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary, c. 10th century AD.
  4. Ancient Vietnamese, the language represented by Chữ Nôm and the Chinese–Vietnamese glossary Huáyí Yìyǔ. By this point, a tone split had happened in the language, leading to six tones but a loss of contrastive voicing among consonants.
  5. Middle Vietnamese, the language of the Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum of the Jesuit missionary Alexandre de Rhodes.
  6. Modern Vietnamese, from the 19th century.

    Proto-Viet–Muong

The following diagram shows the phonology of Proto-Viet–Muong, along with the outcomes in the modern language:
According to Ferlus, * and * are not accepted by all researchers. Ferlus 1992 also had additional phonemes * and *.
The fricatives indicated above in parentheses developed as allophones of stop consonants occurring between vowels. These fricatives were not present in Proto-Viet–Muong, as indicated by their absence in Muong, but were evidently present in the later Proto-Vietnamese stage. Subsequent loss of the minor-syllable prefixes phonemicized the fricatives. Ferlus 1992 proposes that originally there were both voiced and voiceless fricatives, corresponding to original voiced or voiceless stops, but Ferlus 2009 appears to have abandoned that hypothesis, suggesting that stops were softened and voiced at approximately the same time, according to the following pattern:
In Middle Vietnamese, the outcome of these sounds was written with a hooked b, representing a that was still distinct from v. See below.
It is unclear what this sound was. According to Ferlus 1992, in the Archaic Vietnamese period it was *, distinct at that time from *.
The following initial clusters occurred, with outcomes indicated:
A large number of words were borrowed from Middle Chinese, forming part of the Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary. These caused the original introduction of the retroflex sounds and into the language.

Origin of the tones

Proto-Viet–Muong had no tones to speak of. The tones later developed in some of the daughter languages from distinctions in the initial and final consonants. Vietnamese tones developed as follows:
Glottal-ending syllables ended with a glottal stop, while fricative-ending syllables ended with or. Both types of syllables could co-occur with a resonant.
At some point, a tone split occurred, as in many other Southeast Asian languages. Essentially, an allophonic distinction developed in the tones, whereby the tones in syllables with voiced initials were pronounced differently from those with voiceless initials. Subsequent to this, the plain-voiced stops became voiceless and the allotones became new phonemic tones. Note that the implosive stops were unaffected, and in fact developed tonally as if they were unvoiced.
As noted above, Proto-Viet–Muong had sesquisyllabic words with an initial minor syllable. When a minor syllable occurred, the main syllable's initial consonant was intervocalic and as a result suffered lenition, becoming a voiced fricative. The minor syllables were eventually lost, but not until the tone split had occurred. As a result, words in modern Vietnamese with voiced fricatives occur in all six tones, and the tonal register reflects the voicing of the minor-syllable prefix and not the voicing of the main-syllable stop in Proto-Viet–Muong that produced the fricative. For similar reasons, words beginning with and occur in both registers.

Middle Vietnamese

The writing system used for Vietnamese is based closely on the system developed by Alexandre de Rhodes for his 1651 Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum. It reflects the pronunciation of the Vietnamese of Hanoi at that time, a stage commonly termed Middle Vietnamese. The pronunciation of the "rime" of the syllable, i.e. all parts other than the initial consonant, appears nearly identical between Middle Vietnamese and modern Hanoi pronunciation. On the other hand, the Middle Vietnamese pronunciation of the initial consonant differs greatly from all modern dialects, and in fact is significantly closer to the modern Saigon dialect than the modern Hanoi dialect.
The following diagram shows the orthography and pronunciation of Middle Vietnamese:
's Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum
occurs only at the end of a syllable.

This symbol, "Latin small letter B with flourish", looks like:. It has a rounded hook that starts halfway up the left side and curves about 180 degrees counterclockwise, ending below the bottom-left corner.

does not occur at the beginning of a syllable, but can occur at the end of a syllable, where it is notated i or y, and after and, where it is notated ĕ. This ĕ, and the it notated, have disappeared from the modern language.
Note that b and p never contrast in any position, suggesting that they are allophones.
The language also has three clusters at the beginning of syllables, which have since disappeared:
Most of the unusual correspondences between spelling and modern pronunciation are explained by Middle Vietnamese. Note in particular:
s, acutes and apices.
De Rhodes's orthography also made use of an apex diacritic to indicate a final labial-velar nasal, an allophone of that is peculiar to the Hanoi dialect to the present day. This diacritic is often mistaken for a tilde in modern reproductions of early Vietnamese writing.

Word play

A language game known as nói lái is used by Vietnamese speakers. Nói lái involves switching the tones in a pair of words and also the order of the two words or the first consonant and rime of each word; the resulting nói lái pair preserves the original sequence of tones. Some examples:
The resulting transformed phrase often has a different meaning but sometimes may just be a nonsensical word pair. Nói lái can be used to obscure the original meaning and thus soften the discussion of a socially sensitive issue, as with dấm đài and hoảng chưa or, when implied, to deliver a hidden subtextual message, as with bồi tây. Naturally, nói lái can be used for a humorous effect.
Another word game somewhat reminiscent of pig latin is played by children. Here a nonsense syllable is prefixed onto a target word's syllables, then their initial consonants and rimes are switched with the tone of the original word remaining on the new switched rime.
This language game is often used as a "secret" or "coded" language useful for obscuring messages from adult comprehension.

Examples

The Tale of Kieu is an epic narrative poem by the celebrated poet Nguyễn Du,, which is often considered the most significant work of Vietnamese literature. It was originally written in Chữ Nôm and is widely taught in Vietnam today.

General