Vietnamese

Where it’s spoken

Vietnamese is the official language of Vietnam and the mother tongue of the Kinh majority. Major overseas Vietnamese communities live in the United States (especially California and Texas), France, Australia, Canada, and the Czech Republic, totaling around four million speakers abroad.

What it sounds like

Vietnamese is a tonal language; the northern Hanoi dialect distinguishes six tones, while southern dialects merge two of these into five. Tones are marked above or below vowels in writing. Vietnamese is monosyllabic in vocabulary — most morphemes are single syllables — and grammatical relations are signaled by word order and particles rather than inflection.

How it’s written

Vietnamese uses Chữ Quốc Ngữ, a Latin alphabet with diacritics developed by Portuguese Jesuit missionaries in the 17th century and later codified by Alexandre de Rhodes. It replaced the earlier Chữ Nôm character-based system in the 20th century. Vowel diacritics mark both quality and tone, so words can carry two stacked marks (e.g., ế, ờ).

History

Vietnamese was strongly influenced by over a thousand years of Chinese rule, borrowing about 30–60% of its vocabulary from Classical Chinese, though its core grammar remains Austroasiatic.