Vietnamese

Introduction

Vietnam Mountain

It is thought that the ancestor of the Vietnamese language (also known as Annamese) originated in the area of the Red River in what is now northern Vietnam and that it subsequently spread into central and southern portions of the area.

Vietnamese was influenced by Ind0-Aryan and Malayo-Polynesian languages until the middle of the first millenium AD. After that, Vietnam remained under the Chinese rule for many centuries, and Classical Chinese was used as the official written language during that time. Even after national independence, the Vietnamese continued to use Classical Chinese as the official written language. After the revolution that ended the French colonial regime, Vietnamese became the official language of the Republic of Vietnam.

There are three mutually intelligible dialects of Vietnamese:

Northern, Hanoi dialect, Tonkinese
Central, Hue dialect, High Annamese
Southern, Saigon dialect, Cochinchinese

The Hanoi dialect is accepted as the standard.

Vietnamese is the official language of the Republic of Vietnam where it is spoken by 65 million, or 87% of the population. It is also spoken in Australia, Cambodia, Canada, China, Cote d'Ivoire, Finland, France, Germany, Laos, Martinique, Netherlands, New Caledonia, Norway, Philippines, Senegal, Thailand, United Kingdom, USA, Vanuatu. The total Vietnamese-speaking population of the world is estimated to be around 68 million (Ethnologue).

Vietnamese is used in Vietnam throughout all levels of the educational system, including higher education. There is a significant amount of publishing in Vietnamese.

Click on the Modern Language Association Interactive Language Map to see where Vietnamese is spoken in the United States.

Structure

Sound System

Vietnam People

Children Smiling

Vowels
Vietnamese is a vowel-rich language with 10 simple vowels ( monophthongs), plus a variety of simple vowel + /j/ or /w/ combinations (diphthongs and triphthongs). There is a good deal of dialectal variation in the vowel system.

Click here to listen to the pronunciation of Vietnamese vowels.

The correspondence between pronunciation and writing is quite complicated as far as vowels are concerned. The same letter can either represent either two different monophthongs, or both a monophthong and a diphthong, or different letters can represent the same monophthong.

Tones
Vietnamese is a tonal language, i.e., the meaning of words is affected by the tone with which vowels are pronounced. Vietnamese tones are quite complex because vowels can be pronounced with variations in

pitch
length
contour
intensity
degree of vocal cord constriction

There are six tones in Vietnamese. Their pronunciation varies from dialect to dialect.

Vietnamese Tones

Click here to listen to the pronunciation of these tones. Have fun!

Consonants
There are 19-21 consonants in Vietnamese, depending on the dialect. Several features are worth mentioning:

the sound /p/ occurs only in words borrowed from French;
the sounds /b/ and /d/ are pronounced with the vocal cords pressed together resulting in an implosive sound when the closure is released;
there are three different nasal sounds: /n/ plain,// palatalized, and // velarized;

Click here to hear the pronunciation of Vietnamese consonants.

Consonant clusters
There are no consonant clusters in Vietnamese. The syllable structure is generally Consonant-Vowel-Consonant.

Grammar

Like other languages of the Austro-Asiatic family, Vietnamese is an analytic language, i.e., it does not use prefixes and suffixes to express grammatical relations. Instead, it uses syntactic constructions to express what Indo-European languages express through prefixes and suffixes.

Noun phrase
Vietnamese nouns are not marked for number, gender, or case. However, they make extensive use of classifiers which are as common as articles are in English. Classifiers indicate what class a noun belongs to, e.g., animate objects, inanimate objects, animate objects, books, sharp objects, buildings, flat objects, etc.

Verb phrase
Verbs are not marked for person, number, or tense.

Reduplication
Reduplication, or repeating a word or a portion of a word, a regular part of the language. It usually denotes intensity. Names of birds, insects, and plants are also often reduplicated. Here is an example:

Word order
Word order in Vietnamese is strictly Subject-Verb-Object.

Vocabulary

As a result of thousands of years of Chinese domination, close to 70% of Vietnamese vocabulary is borrowed from Chinese. In addition, there are many compounds composed of native Vietnamese words combined with Chinese borrowings. When France invaded Vietnam in the late 19th century, French gradually replaced Chinese as the official written language of education and government. As a result, Vietnamese adopted many French words, e.g., bia "beer" from the French bierre, so co la "chocolate" from the French chocolat, ca phé "coffee" from the French café.

New Vietnamese terms are being constantly developed to keep abreast of scientific and technological inventions.

Writing

Writing
Vietnamese was written with modified Chinese characters from the 2nd to the 10th centuries BC, when Vietnam was a province of China. However, present-day Vietnamese is written with a Latin-based alphabet developed in the 17th century by a French Jesuit missionary Alexandre de Rhodes (1591-1660), based on the work of earlier Portuguese missionaries. The use of the script was gradually extended from its initial religious domain to include other types of writing. When the French occupied Vietnam in the 19th century, the script became a requirement for all public writing. It became predominant by the beginning of the 20th century when education became more widespread.

Click here to see the Vietnamese alphabet with audio
Click here to listen to the pronunciation.
Click here to learn more about the Vietnamese writing system.

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Vietnamese?

What does this written text tell you about the structure of Vietnamese words?
What do the diacritics over the vowels indicate?

Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Vietnamese

Translation
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Resources

Vietnamese Language Study Resources
UCLA Language Materials Project - Vietnamese
Less Commonly Taught Languages Course Offerings
Online Vietnamese Language and Culture Lessons from Northern Illinois University
Introduction to the Vietnamese Language - interactive lessons on the Web
English-Vietnamese-English Online Dictionary
Multimedia Materials