Vietnamese language

Vietnamese (tiếng Việt) is an Austroasiatic language primarily spoken in 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 following 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. Borrowings from Middle Chinese, known as Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary, form a significant part of the lexicon. The vocabulary has also had significant influence from French.

Vietnamese is written using the Vietnamese alphabet (chữ Quốc ngữ). The alphabet is based on the Latin script, largely relying 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 (chữ Hán) and locally created characters to represent native Vietnamese words and sounds.