Vietnamese language

Vietnamese language
Mon-Khmer language, the native language of 60–65 million people in Vietnam and a second language for many members of Vietnam's more than 50 minority ethnic groups, with some 2 million speakers outside the country.

For much of Vietnam's history, Classical Chinese was the dominant literary language, and Chinese vocabulary given a Vietnamese pronunciation ("Sino-Vietnamese") remains a significant part of the language's lexicon. By the 13th century Chinese characters were adapted to write native Vietnamese words. In the 17th century Roman Catholic missionaries introduced a system of writing Vietnamese in the Latin alphabet with diacritics distinguishing vowel qualities and tones, a system that was widely adopted only in the 20th century.

* * *

      official language of Vietnam, spoken in the early 21st century by more than 70 million people. It belongs to the Viet-Muong subbranch of the Vietic branch of the Mon-Khmer (Mon-Khmer languages) family, which is itself a part of the Austroasiatic stock. Except for a group of divergent rural dialects (dialect) spoken between Hue and Vinh, most of the dialects of Vietnamese differ from each other to about the same degree as do the dialects of English in the United States. The standard language is based on the speech of educated people living in and around Hanoi. A large proportion of the vocabulary of Vietnamese has been borrowed from Chinese, and the influence of Tai languages is also evident. See Austroasiatic languages.

      Characteristics of Vietnamese include the use of tones to distinguish words with identical consonant and vowel sequences, the use of word order to express the syntactic relations of words to each other, and the use of modifiers rather than affixes to express the tense and voice of verb forms.

* * *


Universalium. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Поможем написать курсовую

Look at other dictionaries:

  • Vietnamese language — Vietnamese Tiếng Việt Pronunciation [tiə̌ŋ viə̀ˀt] (Northern) [tiə̌n jiə̀k] (Southern) Spoken in …   Wikipedia

  • Vietnamese syntax — Vietnamese, like many languages in Southeast Asia, is an analytic (or isolating) language. [Comparison note: As such its grammar relies on word order and sentence structure rather than morphology (in which word changes through inflection).… …   Wikipedia

  • Vietnamese morphology — Vietnamese, like many languages in Southeast Asia, is an analytic (or isolating) language. Vietnamese lacks morphological marking of case, gender, number, and tense (and, as a result, has no finite/nonfinite distinction). [Comparison note: As… …   Wikipedia

  • Vietnamese name — Vietnamese names generally consist of three parts: a family name, a middle name, and a given name, used in that order. Like their Chinese, Korean, and other counterparts, this is in accordance to the East Asian system of personal names. In a… …   Wikipedia

  • Vietnamese literature — is literature, both oral and written, created largely by Vietnamese speaking people, although Francophone Vietnamese and English speaking Vietnamese authors in Australia and the United States are counted by many critics as part of the national… …   Wikipedia

  • Vietnamese pronouns — [In Vietnamese, đại từ xưng hô personal substitutes .] can act as substitutions for noun phrase. While true pronouns exist in Vietnamese, most are rarely used in polite speech. For most cases, kinship terminology is used when referring to oneself …   Wikipedia

  • Vietnamese Quoted-Readable — Vietnamese Quoted Readable, usually abbreviated VIQR and also known as Vietnet, is a convention for writing Vietnamese using ASCII characters. Because the Vietnamese alphabet contains a complex system of diacritical marks, VIQR requires the user… …   Wikipedia

  • Vietnamese — is an adjective describing things of or pertaining to Vietnam. Vietnamese may refer to: *Vietnamese language, the most widely spoken of the Viet Muong languages *Vietnamese people, the dominant ethnic group of Vietnam …   Wikipedia

  • Vietnamese quoted-readable — Le Vietnamese Quoted Readable (VIQR) est une convention qui permet d écrire le vietnamien sur l internet en n utilisant que des caractères ASCII, par exemple lorsque l Unicode n est pas disponible  VIQR fut créé avant unicode. En effet, l… …   Wikipédia en Français

  • Vietnamese braille — (Màn hình chữ nổi) is a Braille system for the Vietnamese language.Basic latin letters use the same braille cells as English. The system has added characters for special letters and tones. Added Symbols Letters Tones Example * One braille for… …   Wikipedia

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”