Vietnamese language

Vietnamese (Tiếng Việt), a tonal language, is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 87% of Vietnam's population, in addition to about two million Vietnamese emigrants, including a significant number of Vietnamese Americans. Although it contains many vocabulary borrowings from Chinese and was originally written using Chinese characters, it is considered by linguists to be one of the Austroasiatic languages, of which it has the most speakers (it has 10 times the number of speakers as the next most-spoken language, the Khmer language).

History

Classification

Vietnamese is part of the Viet-Muong grouping of the Mon-Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic language family, a family that also includes the Khmer language, spoken in Cambodia.

Geographic distribution

According to the Ethnologue, Vietnamese is also spoken in Australia, Cambodia, Canada, China, Côte d'Ivoire, Finland, France, Germany, Laos, Martinique, Netherlands, New Caledonia, Norway, Philippines, Senegal, Thailand, United Kingdom, USA, and Vanuatu.

Official status

Vietnamese is the official language of Vietnam.

Dialects

There are various mutually intelligible dialects (as intelligible as the dialects of English found in the United States), the main three being:

These dialects differ slightly in tone, although the Hué dialect is somewhat more different than others. The hỏi and ngã tones are more distinct in the northern than in the southern dialect. The current standard pronunciation and spellings are based on the dialect of an educated Hanoi speaker.

Sounds

Vowels

Rounding is contrastive for non-low back vowels.

Consonants

* /th/ is an unvoiced, aspirated alveolar stop

Grammar

Vocabulary

Writing system

Presently, the written language uses the Vietnamese alphabet (quốc ngữ or "national script"), based on the Latin alphabet. Originally a Romanization of Vietnamese, it was introduced in the 17th century by a French Jesuit missionary named Alexandre de Rhodes (1591-1660), based on works of earlier Portuguese missionaries. With the occupation of the French in the 19th century, it became popular and by the late 20th century virtually all writings were done in quốc ngữ.

Prior to French occupation, the first two Vietnamese writing systems were based on Chinese script:

• the standard ideographic Chinese character set called chữ nho (scholar's characters, 字儒): used to write Literary Chinese
• a complicated variant form known as chữ nôm (southern/vernacular characters, 字喃) with characters not found in the Chinese character set; this system was better adapted to the unique phonetic aspects of Vietnamese which differed from Chinese

The authentic Chinese writing, chữ nho, was in more common usage, whereas chữ nôm was used by members of the educated elite (one needs to be able to read chữ nho in order to read chữ nôm). Both scripts have fallen out of common usage in modern Vietnam, and chữ nôm is near-extinct.

The six tones in Vietnamese are:

Tone markers are written above the vowel they affect, with the exception of Nặng, where the dot goes below the vowel. For example, the common family name Nguyễn begins with SAMPA /N/ (this sound is difficult for native English speakers to place at the beginning of a word), and is followed by something approximated by the English word "win". The ~ indicates a dipping tone; start somewhat low, go down in pitch, then rise to the end of the word.

Like English and many other languages on earth, Vietnamese, originally a monosyllabic language, as demonstrated by its rich tonal system and syllabic diphthongs and triphthongs meant to differentiate one-syllable words, has long become a polysyllabic language, as clearly evidenced with the presence of more than half of its multi-syllabic and compound words in its overall bountiful vocabulary stock.

Computer support

Unicode contains all characters that are necessary to write Vietnamese. There are also a number of codepages designed for representing Vietnamese texts, such as VISCII or CP1258.

Where ASCII must be used, Vietnamese is often typed using the VIQR convention.

Examples

This text is from the first six lines of Kim Vân Kiều, an epic poem by the celebrated poet Nguyễn Du, 阮攸 (1765-1820). It was originally written in Nôm (titled 金雲翹), and is widely taught in Vietnam today.

Trăm năm trong cõi người ta,

Chữ tài chữ mệnh khéo là ghét nhau.

Trải qua một cuộc bể dâu,

Những điều trông thấy mà đau đớn lòng.

Lạ gì bỉ sắc tư phong,

Trời xanh quen thói má hồng đánh ghen.

Full text (in Vietnamese)

English translation

Four score and two tens, within that short span of human life,

Talent and Destiny are poised in bitter conflict.

Oceans turn to mulberry fields: a desolate scene!

More gifts, less chance, such is the law of Nature

And the blue sky is known to be jealous of rosy cheeks.

External links

• Wikipedia in Vietnamese [vi]
• VDict : Vietnamese online dictionaries
• Ethnologue report for Vietnamese
• British Museum Exhibit : Exhibit of classical Vietnamese, including Kim Van Kieu .
• Introduction to Vietnamese : Introduction to Vietnamese for Mandarin speakers.
• Nom Foundation : An organization dedicated to the preservation of the Nom writing.
  • Nom look-up
• Vietnamese Writing System : An overview of the Vietnamese writing system.
• 20 lessons