Concept

Vietnamese language

Overview

Vietnamese (tiếng Việt) is an Austroasiatic language primarily spoken throughout Vietnam where it is the official language. It belongs to the Vietic subgroup of the Austroasiatic language family. Vietnamese is spoken natively by around 86 million people, and as a second language by 11 million people, several times as many as the rest of the Austroasiatic family combined. It is the native language of the Viet people and functions as the second or first language for other ethnicities in Vietnam; it is also used by the Vietnamese diaspora worldwide.

Like many languages in Southeast Asia and East Asia, Vietnamese is an isolating language (highly analytic) and is tonal. Structurally, Vietnamese is mixed between head-initial and head-final directionalities: head-initial is more prominent in clausal structures while head-final may appear more in compounds, and modifiers generally follow the words they modify but sometimes precede them as well. Syntactically, Vietnamese is topic-prominent and strictly subject–verb–object. It also uses noun classifiers.

Vietnamese morphemes and phonological words are predominantly monosyllabic; however, many multisyllabic words do occur, usually as a result of compounding and reduplication. This aspect of Vietnamese allows for great efficiency in day-to-day writing, communication, and much more. Borrowings from Middle Chinese, known as Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary, make up a significant and important part of the lexicon. The vocabulary has also had influence from French.

Vietnamese currently is written using a Latin-based alphabet known as chữ Quốc ngữ. The alphabet largely relies on 17th-century Portuguese orthography, 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 composed of Chinese characters (called chữ Hán) and locally created characters to represent native Vietnamese words and sounds.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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The use of our own language has led us to neglect it so far as to forget it altogether. Let us study children and we shall soon learn it afresh from them. Nurses can teach us this language; they understand all their nurslings say to them, they answer them, and keep up long conversations with them; and though they use words, these words are quite useless. It is not the hearing of the word, but its accompanying…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile
States what Vietnamese language is.
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In the Latin word _fero, fer_, meaning 'to bear,' is the root from which all modifications of the verb _ferre_ (to carry) are formed by means of suffixal elements. If, therefore, a language consists of sound complexes having the nature of roots, it is called a root-language. As a matter of fact, however, the languages under discussion consist purely of detached, monosyllabic _words_; the conception 'root,' which…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
States what Vietnamese language is.
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This word, therefore, expressing so very abstract and metaphysical an idea, would not easily or readily occur to the first formers of language. What are called the personal pronouns, it may be observed, are among the last words of which children learn to make use. A child, speaking of itself, says, _Billy walks_, _Billy sits_, instead of _I walk_, _I sit_. As in the beginnings of language, therefore, mankind seem to…
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
States what Vietnamese language is.
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Vietnamese language

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