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Vietnamese (Tiếng Việt) is an Austroasiatic language primarily Speech in Vietnam where it is the official language. It belongs to the Vietic languages 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 ethnic Vietnamese (Kinh), as well as the second language or First language language for other ethnicities of Vietnam, and used by Vietnamese diaspora in the world.
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 French language. Vietnamese morphemes and phonological words are predominantly monosyllabic, however many multisyllabic words do occur, usually as a result of compounding and reduplication.
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 Indochina. It uses digraphs and to mark tones and some . 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 representing other words.
This ancestral Vietic was typologically very different from later Vietnamese. As well as monosyllabic roots, it had sesquisyllabic roots consisting of a reduced syllable followed by a full syllable, and featured many consonant clusters. Both of these features are found elsewhere in Austroasiatic and in modern conservative Vietic languages south of the Red River area. The language was non-tonal, but featured glottal stop and voiceless fricative codas.
Borrowed vocabulary indicates early contact with speakers of Tai languages in the last millennium BC, which is consistent with genetic evidence from Dong Son culture sites. Extensive contact with Chinese language began from the Han dynasty (2nd century BC). At this time, Vietic groups began to expand south from the Red River Delta and into the adjacent uplands, possibly to escape Chinese encroachment. The oldest layer of loans from Chinese into northern Vietic (which would become the Viet–Muong subbranch) date from this period.
The northern Vietic varieties thus became part of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, in which languages from genetically unrelated families converged toward characteristics such as isolating morphology and similar syllable structure. Many languages in this area, including Viet–Muong, underwent a process of tonogenesis, in which distinctions formerly expressed by final consonants became phonemic tonal distinctions when those consonants disappeared. These characteristics have become part of many of the genetically unrelated languages of Southeast Asia; for example, Tsat language (a member of the Malayo-Polynesian group within Austronesian), and Vietnamese each developed tones as a phonemic feature.
After the split from Muong around the end of the first millennium AD, the following stages of Vietnamese are commonly identified:
After expelling the Chinese at the beginning of the 10th century, the Ngô dynasty adopted Classical Chinese as the formal medium of government, scholarship and literature. With the dominance of Chinese came wholesale importation of Chinese vocabulary. The resulting Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary makes up about a third of the Vietnamese lexicon in all realms, and may account for as much as 60% of the vocabulary used in formal texts.
Vietic languages were confined to the northern third of modern Vietnam until the "southward advance" (Nam tiến) from the late 15th century. The conquest of the ancient nation of Champa and the conquest of the Mekong Delta led to an expansion of the Vietnamese people and language, with distinctive local variations emerging.
After France invaded Vietnam in the late 19th century, French gradually replaced Literary Chinese as the official language in education and government. Vietnamese adopted many French terms, such as đầm ('dame', from madame), ga ('train station', from gare), sơ mi ('shirt', from chemise), and búp bê ('doll', from poupée), resulting in a language that was Austroasiatic but with major Sino-influences and some minor French influences from the French colonial era.
| + Proto-Vietic consonants |
The aspirated stops are infrequent and result from clusters of stops and *. The proto-phoneme * is also infrequent, and has reflexes only in Viet-Muong. However, it occurs in some important words and is cognate with Khmu language . Ferlus 1992 also had additional * and *.
Proto-Vietic had monosyllables CV(C) and sesquisyllables C-CV(C). The following initial clusters occurred, with outcomes indicated:
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 (e.g. or ).
At some point, a tone split occurred, as in many other mainland 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. (Approximately speaking, the voiced were pronounced with additional breathy voice or creaky voice and with lowered pitch. The quality difference predominates in today's northern varieties, e.g. in Hanoi, while in the southern varieties the pitch difference predominates, as in Ho Chi Minh City.) Subsequent to this, the plain-voiced stops became voiceless and the allotones became new phonemic tones.
The implosive stops (, and ) were unaffected, and in fact developed tonally as if they were unvoiced. (This behavior is common to all East Asian languages with implosive stops.) These stops merged with the corresponding nasals (, and ) before the Old Vietnamese period.
As noted above, consonants following minor syllables became voiced fricatives. 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-Vietic that produced the fricative. For similar reasons, words beginning with and occur in both registers. (Thompson 1976 reconstructed voiceless resonants to account for outcomes where resonants occur with a first-register tone, but this is no longer considered necessary, at least by Ferlus.)
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 (modern s, tr) into the language.
| + Old Vietnamese consonants |
The Đại báo used Chinese characters phonetically where each word, monosyllabic in Modern Vietnamese, is written with two Chinese characters or in a composite character made of two different characters. This conveys the transformation of the Vietnamese lexicon from sesquisyllabic to fully monosyllabic under the pressure of Chinese linguistic influence, characterized by linguistic phenomena such as the reduction of minor syllables; loss of affixal morphology drifting towards analytical grammar; simplification of major syllable segments, and the change of suprasegment instruments. For example, the modern Vietnamese word trời 'heaven' was *plời in Old Vietnamese and blời in Middle Vietnamese.
Subsequent changes to initial consonants included:
The following diagram shows the orthography and pronunciation of Middle Vietnamese:
| + Middle Vietnamese consonants |
occurs only at the end of a syllable.
This letter, , is no longer used.
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'' (with the difference between the two often indicating differences in the quality or length of the preceding vowel), 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:
De Rhodes's orthography also made use of an Vietnamese tilde diacritic on and to indicate a final labial-velar nasal , an allophone of that is peculiar to the Hanoi dialect to the present day. An example is , which later became . This diacritic is often mistaken for a tilde in modern reproductions of early Vietnamese writing.
As the national language, Vietnamese is the lingua franca in Vietnam. It is also spoken by the Jing people traditionally residing on three islands (now joined to the mainland) off Dongxing in southern Guangxi, China. (2025). 9781441142351, Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781441142351 A large number of Vietnamese speakers also reside in neighboring countries of Cambodia and Laos.
In the United States, Vietnamese is the sixth 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-most in Georgia, Louisiana, and Virginia; and fifth-most in Arkansas and California. Vietnamese is the third most spoken language in Australia other than English, after Mandarin and Arabic. In France, it is the most spoken Asian language and the eighth most spoken immigrant language at home. La dynamique des langues en France au fil du XXe siècle Insee, enquête Famille 1999. (in French)
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. Česko má nové oficiální národnostní menšiny. Vietnamce a Bělorusy (in Czech)
In the U.S. city of San Francisco, municipal services began to be offered in Vietnamese starting in 2024.
Since the 1980s, Vietnamese language schools (trường Việt ngữ/ trường ngôn ngữ Tiếng Việt) have been established for youth in many Vietnamese-speaking communities around the world such as in the United States, Germany, and France.
Front and central vowels (i, ê, e, ư, â, ơ, ă, a) are Roundedness, whereas the back vowels (u, ô, o) 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 .There are different descriptions of Hanoi vowels. Another common description is that of :
This description distinguishes four degrees of vowel height and a rounding contrast (rounded vs. unrounded) between back vowels. The relative shortness of ă and â would then be a secondary feature. Thompson describes the vowel ă as being slightly higher (Near-open vowel) than a .
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The centering diphthongs are formed with only the three high vowels (i, ư, u). 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 (or ) and centering diphthongs, Vietnamese has closing and . The closing diphthongs and triphthongs consist of a main vowel component followed by a shorter semivowel offglide or .The closing diphthongs and triphthongs as described by Thompson can be compared with the description above:
There are restrictions on the high offglides: cannot occur after a front vowel (i, ê, e) nucleus and cannot occur after a back vowel (u, ô, o) nucleus.
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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 .
Some consonant sounds are written with only one letter (like "p"), other consonant sounds are written with a digraph (like "ph"), and others are written with more than one letter or digraph (the velar stop is written variously as "c", "k", or "q"). In some cases, they are based on their Middle Vietnamese pronunciation; since that period, ph and kh (but not th) have evolved from aspirated stops into fricatives (like Greek phi and chi), while d and gi have collapsed and converged together (into /z/ in the north and /j/ in the south).
Not all dialects of Vietnamese have the same consonant in a given word (although all dialects use the same spelling in the written language). See the language variation section for further elaboration.
Syllable-final orthographic ch and nh in Vietnamese has had different analyses. One analysis has final ch, nh as being 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 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 (cf. ach from aic, anh from aing). (See for further details.)
Tone is indicated by diacritics written above or below the vowel (most of the tone diacritics appear above the vowel; except the nặng tone dot diacritic goes below the vowel). The six tones in the northern varieties (including Hanoi), with their self-referential Vietnamese names, are:
| ngang 'level' | mid level | ˧ | (no mark) | ma 'ghost' | ||
| huyền 'deep' | low falling (often breathy) | ˨˩ | (grave accent) | mà 'but' | U+0340 or U+0300 | |
| sắc 'sharp' | high rising | ˧˥ | (acute accent) | má 'cheek, mother (southern)' | U+0341 or U+0301 | |
| hỏi 'questioning' | mid dipping-rising | ˧˩˧ | (hook above) | mả 'tomb, grave' | U+0309 | |
| ngã 'tumbling' | creaky high breaking-rising | ˧ˀ˦˥ | (tilde) | mã 'horse (Sino-Vietnamese), code' | U+0342 or U+0303 | |
| nặng 'heavy' | creaky low falling constricted (short length) | ˨˩ˀ | (dot below) | mạ 'rice seedling' | U+0323 |
Other dialects of Vietnamese may have fewer tones (typically only five).
/ref> The curves represent temporal pitch variation while two sloped lines (//) indicates a glottal stop. |
In Vietnamese poetry, tones are classed into two groups: (tone pattern)
| 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.
Vietnamese tones were classified into two main groups, bằng (平; 'level tones') and trắc (仄; 'sharp tones'). Some tones such as ngang belong to the bằng group, while others such as ngã belong to the trắc group. Then, these tones were further divided in several other categories: bình (平; 'even'), thượng (上; 'rising'), khứ (去; 'departing'), and nhập (入; 'entering').
Sắc and nặng are counted twice in the system, once in khứ (去; 'departing') and again in nhập (入; 'entering'). The reason for the extra two tones is that syllables ending in the stops /p/, /t/, /c/ and /k/ are treated as having entering tones, but phonetically they are exactly the same.
The tones in the old classification were called Âm bình 陰平 ( ngang), Dương bình 陽平 ( huyền), Âm thượng 陰上 ( hỏi), Dương thượng 陽上 ( ngã), Âm khứ 陰去 ( sắc; for words that do not end in /p/, /t/, /c/ and /k/), Dương khứ 陽去 ( nặng; for words that do not end in /p/, /t/, /c/ and /k/), Âm nhập 陰入 ( sắc; for words that do end in /p/, /t/, /c/ and /k/), and Dương nhập 陽入 ( nặng; for words that do end in /p/, /t/, /c/ and /k/).
| + ! colspan="2" | Traditional tone category !Traditional tone name !Modern tone name !Example | |||
| bằng 平 | bình 平 | Âm bình 陰平 | ngang | ma 'ghost' |
| Dương bình 陽平 | huyền | mà 'but' | ||
| trắc 仄 | thượng 上 | Âm thượng 陰上 | hỏi | rể 'son-in-law; groom' |
| Dương thượng 陽上 | ngã | rễ 'root' | ||
| khứ 去 | Âm khứ 陰去 | sắc | lá 'leaf' | |
| Dương khứ 陽去 | nặng | lạ 'strange' | ||
| nhập 入 | Âm nhập 陰入 sắc | mắt 'eye' | ||
| Dương nhập 陽入 | nặng | mặt 'face' |
Some Vietnamese sentences with English word glosses and translations are provided below.
| +Basic lexemes in Vietnamese, Mường, May language and Munda languages !English !Vietnamese !Mường !May !Munda !Proto-Vietic | |||||
| one | một | mốch, môch | muc | mɨy (Sora language) | *moːc |
| two | hai | hal | haːl | bar (Santali language) | *haːr |
| three | ba | pa | pa | pe (Santali language) | *pa |
| four | bốn | pổn | pon | pon (Santali language) | *poːnʔ |
| five | năm | đằm, đăm | dăm | mɔ̃ɽɛ̃ (Santali language) | *ɗam |
| six | sáu | khảu | plǎų | tuɾui (Korku language) | *p-ruːʔ |
| seven | bảy | páy | pǎi | ei (Korku language) | *pəs |
| eight | tám | thảm | tʰam | tʰam (Sora language) | *saːmʔ |
| nine | chín | chỉn | cin | tin (Sora language) | *ciːnʔ |
| ten | mười/ chục | mườl | mal/ cuk | gel (Sora language) | *maːl/*ɟuːk |
| you | mày | mi | ʔami | amən (Sora language) | *miː |
| rain | mưa | mưa | kuma̤ | gama (Mundari language) | *k-ma |
| wind | gió | xỏ | kuzɔ | hɔjɔ (Mundari language) | *k-jɔːʔ ~ *kʰjɔːʔ |
| mountain | rú | khũ | ɓlu | bɘru (Sora language) | *b-ruːʔː |
| young | non | non | kunɔn | kɔnɔn (Kharia language) | *k-nɔːn |
| water | nác > nước | đác | dak | daʔa (Sora language) | *ɗaːk |
| cold | lạnh | lẽnh | tabat/l͎uɓat | raŋga (Kharia language) | *nl͎eŋ |
| smoke | mù/ khói | mù/ khỏi | hako | poro (Sora language) | *ɓɔːjʔ |
| leaf | lá | lả | ʔula | ola (Sora language) | *s-laːʔ |
| rice | gạo | cảo | tako | caole (Santali language) | *r-koːʔ |
| meat | ñśic > thịt | thit | cit | sissid (Sora language) | *-siːt |
| fish | cá | cả | ʔaka | hako (Santali language) | *ʔa-kaːʔ |
| rat | chuột | chuột | kune | gubu (Bonda language) | *k-ɟɔːt |
| pig | cúi | củi | kul | sukri (Santali language) | *kuːrʔ |
| fly (n.) | ruồi | ròi | muɽɔi̯ | aroi (Sora language) | *m-rɔːj |
| hold | cầm | cầm | kadap | kum-si (Sora language) | *nkɘm |
| yawn | ngáp | ngáp | puŋoh | aŋgɔ'b (Santali language) | *s-ŋaːp |
| to stab | chọc | choc | catʔ | suj (Sora language) | *ncuk(i) |
| steal | trộm (đồ) | lỗm | lom | kombro (Santali language) | *t.luːmʔ |
Other compound words, such as nước non (chữ Nôm: 渃𡽫, "country/nation", lit. "water and mountains"), appear to be of purely Vietnamese origin and used to be inscribed in chữ Nôm characters (compounded, self-coined Chinese characters) but are now written in the Vietnamese alphabet.
Modern linguists describe modern Vietnamese having lost many Proto-Austroasiatic phonological and morphological features that original Vietnamese had. The Chinese influence on Vietnamese corresponds to various periods when Vietnam was under Chinese rule and subsequent influence after Vietnam became independent. Early linguists thought that this meant the Vietnamese lexicon had only two influxes of Chinese words, one stemming from the period under actual Chinese rule and a second from afterwards. These words are grouped together as Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary.
However, according to linguist John Phan, "Annamese Middle Chinese" was already used and spoken in the Red River Valley by the 1st century CE, and its vocabulary significantly fused with the co-existing Proto-Viet-Muong language, the immediate ancestor of Vietnamese. He lists three major classes of Sino-Vietnamese borrowings: Early Sino-Vietnamese (Han dynasty ca. 1st century CE and Jin dynasty ca. 4th century CE), Late Sino-Vietnamese (Tang dynasty), and Recent Sino-Vietnamese (Ming dynasty and afterwards)
"Cà phê" in Vietnamese was derived from the French café (coffee). Yogurt in Vietnamese is "sữa chua" (), but it is also calqued from French ( yaourt) into Vietnamese ( da ua - /j/a ua). "Phô mai" (cheese) is from the French fromage. Musical note was borrowed into Vietnamese as "nốt" or "nốt nhạc", from the French note de musique. The Vietnamese term for steering wheel is "vô lăng", a partial derivation from the French volant directionnel. A necktie ( cravate in French) is rendered into Vietnamese as "cà vạt".
In addition, modern Vietnamese pronunciations of French names correspond directly to the original French pronunciations ( "Pa-ri" for Paris, "Mác-xây" for Marseille, "Boóc-đô" for Bordeaux, etc.), whereas pronunciations of other foreign names (Chinese language excluded) are generally derived from English.
The second wave was during the brief Japanese occupation of Vietnam from 1940 until 1945. However, Japanese cultural influence in Vietnam started significantly from the 1980s. This newer second wave of Japanese-origin loanwords is distinctive from the Sino-Vietnamese words of Japanese origin in that they were borrowed directly from Japanese. This vocabulary includes words representative of Japanese culture, such as kimono, sumo, samurai, and bonsai from modified Hepburn romanisation. These loanwords are coined as "new Japanese loanwords". A significant number of new Japanese loanwords were also of Chinese origin. Sometimes the same concept can be described using both Sino-Vietnamese words of Japanese origin (first wave) and new Japanese loanwords (second wave). For example, judo can be referred to as both judo and nhu đạo, the Vietnamese reading of 柔道.
Some examples with newer and older slang that originate from northern, central, or southern Vietnamese dialects include:
| + !Word !IPA !Description | ||
| vãi | "Vãi" (predominately from northern Vietnamese) is a profanity word that can be a noun or a verb depending on the context. It refers to a female Buddhist temple-goer in its noun form and to "spilling something over" in its verb form. In slang terms, it is commonly used to emphasize an adjective or a verb - for example, ngon vãi ("very delicious"), sợ vãi ("very scary"). Similar uses to the profanity bloody. | |
| trẻ trâu | A noun whose literal translation is "buffalo kid". It is usually used to describe younger children or others who behave like perceived stereotypes of children, like putting on airs and acting foolishly to attract other people's attention (with negative actions, words, and thoughts). | |
| gấu | A noun meaning "bear". It is also commonly used to refer to someone's lover. | |
| gà | A noun meaning "chicken". It is also commonly used to refer to someone's lack of ability to complete or compete in a task. | |
| cá sấu | A noun meaning "crocodile". It is also commonly used to refer to someone's lack of beauty. The word sấu can be pronounced similarly to xấu (ugly). | |
| thả thính | A verb used to describe the action of dropping roasted bran as bait for fish. Nowadays it is also used to describe the act of dropping hints to another person one is attracted to. | |
| nha (and other variants) | Similar to other particles (nhé, nghe, nhỉ, nhá), it can be used to end sentences. "Rửa chén, nhỉ" can mean "Wash the dishes... yeah?" | |
| dô (South) and dzô or zô (North) | Eye dialect of the word vô, meaning "in". Slogans when drinking at parties. Usually people in the south of Vietnam will pronounce it as "dô", but people in the north pronounce it as "dzô". The letter "z", which is not usually present in the Vietnamese alphabet, can be used for emphasis or for slang terms. | |
| lu bu, lu xu bu | , | "Lu bu" (from southern Vietnamese) meaning busy. "Lu xu bu" meaning so busy at a particular task or activity that the person cannot do much else - e.g., quá lu bu (so busy). |
A Vietnamese Catholic, Nguyễn Trường Tộ, unsuccessfully petitioned the Court suggesting the adoption of a script for Vietnamese based on Chinese characters.
The Vietnamese alphabet contains 29 letters, supplementing the Latin alphabet with an additional consonant letter ( đ) and 6 additional vowel letters ( ă, â/ê/ô, ơ, ư) formed with . The Latin letters f, j, w and z are not used. The script also represents additional using ten digraphs ( ch, gh, gi, kh, ng, nh, ph, qu, th, and tr) and a single trigraph ( ngh). Further diacritics are used to indicate the tone of each syllable:
| (no mark) | ngang 'level' |
| (grave accent) | huyền 'deep' |
| (acute accent) | sắc 'sharp' |
| (hook above) | hỏi 'questioning' |
| (tilde) | ngã 'tumbling' |
| (dot below) | nặng 'heavy' |
Thus, it is possible for diacritics to be stacked e.g. ể, combining letter with diacritic, ê, with diacritic for tone, ẻ, to make ể.
Despite the missionaries' creation of the alphabetic script, chữ Nôm remained the dominant script in Vietnamese Catholic literature for more than 200 years.Brian Eugene Ostrowski (2025). 9780877277828, SEAP Publications, Cornell University Press. ISBN 9780877277828 Starting from the late 19th century, the Vietnamese alphabet (chữ Quốc ngữ or 'national language script') gradually expanded from its initial usage in Christian writing to become more popular among the general public.
The romanised script became predominant over the course of the early 20th century, when education became widespread and a simpler writing system was found to be more expedient for teaching and communication with the general population. The French Indochina sought to eliminate Chinese writing, Confucianism, and other Chinese influences from Vietnam. French superseded Literary 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. In turn, Vietnamese reformists and nationalists themselves encouraged and popularized the use of chữ Quốc ngữ. By the middle of the 20th century, most writing was done in chữ Quốc ngữ, which became the official script on independence.
Nevertheless, chữ Hán was still in use during the French colonial period and as late as World War II was still featured on banknotes, but fell out of official and mainstream use shortly thereafter. The education reform by North Vietnam in 1950 eliminated the use of chữ Hán and chữ Nôm.Vũ Thế Khôi (2009). "Ai “bức tử” chữ Hán-Nôm?". Today, only a few scholars and some extremely elderly people are able to read chữ Nôm or use it in Vietnamese calligraphy. Priests of the Gin people minority in China (descendants of 16th-century migrants from Vietnam) use songbooks and scriptures written in chữ Nôm in their ceremonies. (1994). 9780816118106, G.K. Hall. ISBN 9780816118106
| Tháng giêng | |
| Tháng hai (2) | |
| Tháng ba (3) | |
| Tháng tư (4) | |
| Tháng năm (5) | |
| Tháng sáu (6) | |
| Tháng bảy (7) | |
| Tháng tám (8) | |
| Tháng chín (9) | |
| Tháng mười (10) | |
| Tháng mười một (11) | Tháng một |
| Tháng chạp | |
When written in the short form, "DD/MM/YYYY" is preferred.
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 (one thousand six hundred twenty-nine point one five). Because a comma is used as the decimal separator, a semicolon is used to separate two numbers instead.
| Northern Vietnamese dialects | Northern Vietnam |
| Thanh Hóa dialect | Thanh Hoá |
| Central Vietnamese dialects | Nghệ An, Hà Tĩnh, Quảng Bình, Quảng Trị |
| Huế dialect | Huế |
| Southern Vietnamese dialects | South Central Coast, Central Highlands and Southern Vietnam |
Vietnamese has traditionally been divided into three dialect regions: North (45%), Central (10%), and South (45%). Michel Ferlus and Nguyễn Tài Cẩn found that there was a separate North-Central dialect for Vietnamese as well. The term Haut-Annam refers to dialects spoken from the northern Nghệ An Province to the southern (former) Thừa Thiên Province that preserve archaic features (like consonant clusters and undiphthongized vowels) that have been lost in other modern dialects.
The dialect regions differ mostly in their sound systems (see below) but also in vocabulary (including basic and non-basic vocabulary) and grammar. The North-Central and the Central regional varieties, which have a significant number 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 because of its relatively late settlement by Vietnamese-speakers (around the end of the 15th century). The North-Central region is particularly conservative since 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, but 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 although their pronunciation fits the written language the most closely; that is typically because of various words in their vocabulary that are unfamiliar to other speakers (see the example vocabulary table below).
The large movements of people between North and South since the mid-20th century has resulted in a sizable number of Southern residents speaking in the Northern accent/dialect and, to a greater extent, Northern residents speaking in the Southern accent/dialect. After the Geneva Accords of 1954, which called for the temporary division of the country, about a million northerners (mainly from Hanoi, Haiphong, and the surrounding Red River Delta areas) moved south (mainly to Saigon and heavily to Biên Hòa and Vũng Tàu and the surrounding areas) as part of Operation Passage to Freedom. About 180,000 moved in the reverse direction ( Tập kết ra Bắc, literally "go to the North".)
After the Fall of Saigon 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 allowed by the new government's New Economic Zones, a program that lasted from 1975 to 1985. The first half of the program (1975–1980) resulted in 1.3 million people sent to the New Economic Zones (NEZs), most of which were relocated to the southern half of the country in previously uninhabited areas, and 550,000 of them were Northerners. The second half (1981–1985) saw almost 1 million Northerners relocated to the New Economic Zones. Government and military personnel from Northern and North-Central Vietnam are also posted to various locations throughout the country that were often away from their home regions. More recently, the growth of the free market system has resulted in increased interregional movement and relations between distant parts of Vietnam through business and travel. The movements have also resulted in some blending of dialects and 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 standardized accent if possible, which uses the Northern pronunciation. That is true in both Vietnam and overseas Vietnamese communities.
Modern Standard Vietnamese is based on the Hanoi dialect. Nevertheless, the major dialects are still predominant in their respective areas and have also evolved over time with influences from other areas. Historically, accents have been distinguished by how each region pronounces the letters d ( in the Northern dialect and in the Central and Southern dialect) and r ( in the Northern dialect and in the Central and Southern dialects). Thus, the Central and the Southern dialects can be said to have retained a pronunciation closer to Vietnamese orthography and resemble how Middle Vietnamese sounded, in contrast to the modern Northern (Hanoi) dialect, which has since undergone pronunciation shifts.
| + Regional variation in vocabularyTable data from . ! Northern !! Central !! Southern !! English gloss | |||
| "yes" | |||
| "this" | |||
| "thus, this way" | |||
| "that" | |||
| "thus, so, that way" | |||
| "that yonder" | |||
| "where" | |||
| "which" | |||
| "why" | |||
| "how" | |||
| "I, me (polite)" | |||
| "I, me (informal, familiar)" | |||
| "we, us (but not you, colloquial, familiar)" | |||
| "you (informal, familiar)" | |||
| "you guys (informal, familiar)" | |||
| nó | hắn, hấn | nó | "he/she/it (informal, familiar)" |
| "they/them (informal, familiar)" | |||
| "he/him, that gentleman, sir" | |||
| "she/her, that lady, madam" | |||
| "he/him, that young man (of equal status)" | |||
| "field" | |||
| "rice bowl" | |||
| "ladle" | |||
| "head" | |||
| "car" | |||
| "spoon" | |||
| bố | bọ | ba | "father" |
| + Regional consonant correspondences ! Syllable position !! Orthography !! Northern !! North-central !! Central !! Southern |
In addition to the regional variation described above, there is a merger of l and n in certain rural varieties in the North:
| + l, n variation ! Orthography ! "Mainstream" varieties ! Rural varieties |
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 it appears as lăm in mười lăm "fifteen" (see Vietnamese grammar#Cardinal). In some northern varieties, the numeral appears with an initial nh instead of l: hai mươi nhăm "twenty-five", instead of the mainstream hai mươi lăm.
There is also a merger of r and g in certain rural varieties in the South:
| + r, g variation ! Orthography ! "Mainstream" varieties ! Rural varieties |
The consonant clusters that were originally present in Middle Vietnamese (in the 17th century) have been lost in almost all modern Vietnamese varieties although they have been retained in other closely related Vietic languages. However, some speech communities have preserved some of these archaic clusters: "sky" is blời with a cluster in Hảo Nho (Yên Mô, Ninh Bình Province) but trời in Southern Vietnamese and giời in Hanoi Vietnamese (initial single consonants , respectively).
| + Regional tone correspondences ! rowspan="2" | Tone ! rowspan="2" | Northern ! colspan="3" | North-central ! rowspan="2" | Central ! rowspan="2" | Southern |
The table above shows the pitch contour of each tone using Chao tone number notation in which 1 represents the lowest pitch, and 5 the highest; glottalization (creaky voice, stiff voice, harsh voice) is indicated with the symbol; murmured voice with ; glottal stop with ; sub-dialectal variants are separated with commas. (See also the tone section below.)
| Trường học (School) | Học tập (Study) | → | Tập trung (Concentrate) | → |
| Tâm lí (Mentality) | Lí do (Reason) | → | Etc., until someone cannot form the next word or, if the word play is used as a game, gives up. |
Another language game known as nói lái is used by Vietnamese speakers. Nói lái involves switching, adding or removing the tones in a pair of words and may also involve switching the order of words or the first consonant and the Syllable rime of each word. Some examples:
| ! Original phrase !! !! Phrase after nói lái transformation !! Structural change |
| word order and tone switch |
| word order and tone switch |
| initial consonant, rime, and tone switch |
| initial consonant and rime switch |
| initial consonant, rime, and tone switch |
| word order and tone switch |
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 (above), or when implied (and not overtly spoken), to deliver a hidden subtextual message, as with bồi tây. Naturally, nói lái can be used for a humorous effect. www.users.bigpond.com/doanviettrung/noilai.html , Language Log's itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001788.html, and tphcm.blogspot.com/2005/01/ni-li.html for more examples.
Another word game somewhat reminiscent of pig latin is played by children. Here a nonsense syllable (chosen by the child) 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.
| ! Nonsense syllable !! Target word !! !! Intermediate form with prefixed syllable !! !! Resulting "secret" word |
| lơ phả |
| lăn a |
| loan hà lanh cả |
| choan hìm chanh kỉm |
This language game is often used as a "secret" or "coded" language useful for obscuring messages from adult comprehension.
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