Vietnamese language
Most widely spoken Austroasiatic language / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Vietnamese (Vietnamese: tiếng Việt) is an Austroasiatic language spoken primarily in Vietnam where it is the national and 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 the Vietnamese (Kinh) people, as well as a second or first language for other ethnic groups in Vietnam.
| Vietnamese | |
|---|---|
| tiếng Việt | |
| Pronunciation | [tiəŋ˧˦ viət̚˧˨ʔ] (Hà Nội) [tiəŋ˦˧˥ viək̚˨˩ʔ] (Huế) [tiəŋ˦˥ viək̚˨˩˨] ~ [tiəŋ˦˥ jiək̚˨˩˨] (Hồ Chí Minh City) |
| Native to | |
| Ethnicity | Vietnamese |
Native speakers | 85 million (2019)[1] |
Austroasiatic
| |
Early forms | |
| Latin (Vietnamese alphabet) Vietnamese Braille Chữ Nôm (historical) | |
| Official status | |
Official language in |  Vietnam |
Recognised minority language in | |
| Regulated by | Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-1 | vi |
| ISO 639-2 | vie |
| ISO 639-3 | vie |
| Glottolog | viet1252 |
| Linguasphere | 46-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] | |
| This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. | |
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 is often mistakenly thought as being an monosyllabic language, Vietnamese words typically consist of from one to many as ten 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 to represent other words.[8][9]