Vietnamese language

Vietnamese Vietnamese (tiếng Việt, tiếng Việt Nam, or Việt ngữ) is a tonal language, formerly known under French rule as Annamite (see Annam); is the national and official language of Vietnam (Việt Nam). It is the language of the Vietnamese (người Việt or người Kinh), who make up about 87% of the population of Vietnam, and about two million Vietnamese emigrants, including a large portion of Vietnamese Americans. It is the second language of the minority population of Vietnam. Although it contains a lot of Chinese vocabulary and was written using Chinese ideograms before the XX century, it is considered by linguists to be an Austroasiatic language.. It is the one with the largest number of speakers: it has four to five times as many as Cambodian, the second most widely spoken Austroasiatic language.

Vietnamese currently uses the Latin alphabet with many diacritics.

Classification

Vietnamese belongs to the Viet-Muong group, of the Mon-Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic family, a family that also includes Khmer of Cambodia, and various tribal and regional languages such as the Munda languages, spoken in the northeast of India, and others in southern China and northern Malaysia.

Vietnamese is considered to belong to the Austrian superfamily (which also includes Austronesian languages such as Malay, Cham, Malagasy, Maori, and Hawaiian), although the classification of the Austrian superfamily has been disputed, since some linguists consider Vietnamese a language isolate.

Typologically it is an isolating language.

History

In the distant past, Vietnamese probably shared more features with the other languages of the Austroasiatic family, such as an inflectional morphology and a richer variety of consonant clusters, but these features have now disappeared from the language. However, the Vietnamese has been greatly influenced by its location in the sprachbund of Southeast Asia, resulting in the acquisition of characteristics such as isolating morphology and tonogenesis. Although they might have existed in the Proto-Australasiatic language, they have come to be one of the features of the various philologically unrelated languages of Southeast Asia. For example, Thai (one of the Tai-Kadai languages), Tsat (a member of the Malayo-Polynesian family within Austronesia), and Vietnamese all developed tones as a phonemic feature, even though their ancestral languages were not originally tonal.

The ancestor of the Vietnamese language was centered initially in the Red River region of what is now northern Vietnam, and during the later expansion of the Vietnamese language and people into what is now central and southern Vietnam (by the conquest of the ancient Champa kingdom and the Cambodian people of the Mekong Delta, in the vicinity of present-day Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnamese was influenced linguistically at first by Indian and Malayo-Polynesian languages, until Chinese it began to dominate politically about the middle of the first millennium before the common era.

With Chinese political dominance comes the radical importation of Chinese vocabulary and grammatical influence. Since Chinese was, for a long period of time, the only language of literature and government, and also the main language of the ruling class in Vietnam, much of the Vietnamese lexicon consists of Hán Việt, that is, words derived from Chinese. In fact, while the vernacular language of Vietnam gradually gained prestige at the beginning of the second millennium, Vietnamese continued to be written using Chinese characters and local characters (see chữ nôm) that were adapted for writing in the Vietnamese language, as in Japanese (see Kanji), Korean, and other languages of the countries in the Chinese cultural sphere.

As contact with the West increased, the romanized quốc ngữ writing system developed in the 17th century by Portuguese and other Europeans involved in religious conversion and trade in Vietnam. However, the romanized script did not come to dominate until the early XX century, when its use became widespread as a system of simpler writing could improve the education and communication of the general population.

Geographic distribution

Countries with the highest number of Vietnamese speakers.

According to The Ethnologue, apart from Vietnam, Vietnamese is spoken in the following countries:

• GermanyGermany
• Australia
• Cambodia
• CanadaCanada
• Venezuela Venezuela
• ColombiaColombia
• ChinaChina
• Ivory Coast
• Mexico Mexico
• United States
• BrazilBrazil
• Philippines
• FinlandFinland
• Ukraine Ukraine
• France
• Argentina
• LaosLaos
• Sweden Sweden
• Martinique
• SpainSpain
• New Caledonia
• Norway Norway
• South KoreaSouth Korea
• Czech RepublicCzech Republic
• NetherlandsNetherlands
• Russia Russia
• United KingdomUnited Kingdom
• BoliviaBolivia
• Senegal
• JapanJapan
• Thailand
• BelgiumBelgium
• Vanuatu
• Paraguay Paraguay

Official Status

Vietnamese is the official language of Vietnam.

Dialects

There are several mutually intelligible dialects (some more intelligible than others). The three main dialects are:

These dialects are slightly different in tone, although the Huế dialect is markedly different from the others. The tones hỏi and ngã are more distinct in the northern dialect than in the southern one.

Phonology and phonetics

Vowels

The same as the Roman alphabet: "a", "e", "i", "o", "u& #3. 4;. These 5 vowels used with diacritics serve to represent 6 more vowels (â, ă, ê, ô, ơ, ư).

Monophthongs

The table of monophthongs (single vowels) below is a composite of phonetic descriptions by Nguyễn (1997), Thompson (1965), and Han (1966). (See footnotes for their descriptions.)¹ Below is a description of the vowels in Hanoi Vietnamese (these sounds are pronounced differently in other regions of Vietnam):

	Previous	Central	Poster
Closed	i		,, u
Semicrated	e	Русский	or
Semiabierta	‐	Русский
Open		/

All vowels are unrounded, except for the three back vowels: /u/, /o/, and /ɔ/. The vowels /ɜ/ and /ɐ/ are pronounced very short, shorter than the rest. Short /ɐ/ and long /ɐː/ are different vowel phonemes. (The symbol [ː] indicates the length.) There is still the question of whether /əː/ and /ɜ/ differ in quality and length or only in length. The description we have just made takes into account that there is also a difference in the quality of sounds, according to Thompson in (1965).

The correspondence between spelling and pronunciation is very complicated, where a single letter can represent two different monophthongs or a monophthong and a diphthong. The same monophthong can also be represented by more than one letter:

Orthography	Genetic value(s)		Orthography	Genetic value(s)
a	/ː; /,/, / //		or	/,/, /,w/, /w/
ă	///		ô	/o/, / English/, / English/
♪	/ King		.	## ### ######################################
e	/		u	/u/, /w/
ê	/e/, / train/		.	///
i	/i/, /j/		and	/i/, /j/

All written words that begin with a vowel actually begin with a glottal pause [ʔ], which is not represented in the orthography.

Diphthongs and triphthongs

In addition to monophthongs, Vietnamese has several diphthongs and triphthongs. Most are of a vowel followed by /j/ or /w/. (Phonologically speaking, it would be better to think of them as a sequence of one vowel and one consonant.) The table below this text (Nguyễn 1997) indicates the diphthongs and triphthongs of the Hanoi dialect, with their corresponding orthographic signs.

/ Lourdes/ Diptongo	Orthography		/j/ Di-/Triptongo	Orthography		/w/ Di-/Triptongo	Orthography
/i	ia, ya, iê, yê		##	Ži		/iw/	iu (spanish)
//	Monastery, Mushroom		/ Sponge	♪ and, ê		/ew/	êu
/u interpreter/	ua, uô		// network	ai		##	eo
			//j/	ay, a		##	Đu
			//j/	日本語		##	♪
			/uj/	ui		###	ao
			/oj/	ôi		//w/	au, o
			//j/	oi		//w/	Ñu
			// tiraj/	『		/izalw/	iêu, yêu (spoke)
			/u interpreterj/	uôi		###	『

/j/ never follows front vowels (/i/, /e/, /ɛ/). /w/ never follows rounded vowels (/u/, /o/, /ɔ/).

Thompson (1965) reports that in Hanoi, words with the phonemes "ưu" and "ươu" they are pronounced as /iw/ and /iɜw/, respectively, while in other Tonkin Delta dialects they are pronounced as /ɯw/ and /ɯɜw/. Hanoian speakers who pronounce these words as /ɯw/ and /ɯɜw/ are using phonemic pronunciation, something that is not mentioned by Nguyễn (1997).

Thompson also notes that in Hanoi, the diphthongs, "iê" /iɜ/, "ươ" /ɯɜ/, "uô" /uɜ/, can be pronounced as /ie/, /ɯəː/, and /uo/, respectively (according to those who suggest pronunciation by phonemes), but before /k/ and /ŋ/ they are always pronounced /iɜ/, / ɯɜ/, /uɜ/. Nguyễn only says that they are always pronounced like: /iɜ/, /ɯɜ/, /uɜ/.

Consonants

According to Hanoi:

	Bilabial	Alveolar	Retroflection	Palatal	Velar	Gloss
Occlusive	p/b	t/d, [th]*	t	[ty]	k
Fellowship	f/v	s/z	s/z	Z	x/[Y]	h
Nasales	m	n		ñ	N
Liquids		l

• /t^h/ is an occlusive aspired alveolar, deaf.

Grammar

Like many Southeast Asian languages, Vietnamese is an analytical language. It does not use morphology to indicate case, gender, number, or tense, like most European languages (and as a result does not distinguish between conjugated and verboid verbs). That is, instead of changing words internally to indicate such grammatical functions, Vietnamese uses separate grammatical particles and syntactic structures.

The following are some Vietnamese phrases with glosses and English translations:

Giáp	♪	sinh viên.
Giáp	to be	student
"Giáp is a student"

Mai	rarmet	cocoa.
Mai	Very.	High
"Mai is very tall"

Ng/23370i	đ	♪	anh	No.
person	That's it.	to be	(major) brother	Him.
"That person is his brother" (brother of him)

With	chó	♪	ch ng	bao gi	saa	c banner.
classified	dog	this	No.	some.vez	bark	in.absolute
"This dog never barks at all"

No	ch	ăn	cḥm	Viazot Nam	thôi.
Him.	alone.	eat	food	Vietnam	alone.
"He only eats Vietnamese food."

Cai	thngng	chıng	em	No	ch ng	ra	Yeah.
focalization	classified	husband	Me. (as a wife)	Him.	No.	Get out.	What?
"That husband of mine, he's useless."

Tôi	thích	♪	with	ng	đen.
Me. (genic)	Like	focalization	classified	Horse	Black
"I like the black horse"

Vocabulary

As a result of a thousand years of Chinese rule, part of the Vietnamese vocabulary for science and politics derives from Chinese. However, it maintains a basic vocabulary more similar to other languages of its family.

The writing system

Currently, the written language uses the Vietnamese alphabet (quốc ngữ or "national script"), based on the Latin alphabet. Originally a romanization of that language, it was introduced in the 17th century by a Jesuit missionary from France named Alexandre de Rhodes. (1591-1660), building on the previous work of the Portuguese missionaries Gaspar do Amaral and António Barbosa. It became popular with the French occupation of the 19th century century, and in the XX virtually all writing was done in quốc ngữ.

Before the invasion by the French, the first two Vietnamese writing systems were based on the Chinese script:

• the standard Chinese ideographic character game, called ch nho (school characteristics, ⋅): used to write Chinese literature
• a complicated variant, known as ch. nôm (south/mother tongue, oriented)) with characters that are not found in Chinese. This system was better suited to the genetic aspects in which Vietnamese and Chinese differ.

The standard Chinese script, chữ nho, was used more frequently, while the script chữ nôm was used by members of the educated elite (it was necessary to be able to read chữ nho to be able to read chữ nôm). Both writing systems have now fallen out of use in Vietnam, and the chữ nôm system has all but disappeared. The six tones in Vietnamese are:

ASCII symbol	Name ASCII	Name Unicode	Description	Single mouth Unicode (a)
	Ngang	Ngang	no tone (loud)	a (?·i)
/	Sa('c	Scc	ascent	to (?·i);
`	Huye^'n	Huy/25070/n	descendant	à (?·i)
?	Ho?i	H	Deep	roga (?·i)
~	Nga~	Ngã	deep (but not so low)	ã (?·i)
.	Na(.ng	Nngng	bass, glotal	. (?·i)

Tone marks are written above the vowel they affect, with the exception of Nặng, where the dot goes below the vowel. For example, the common surname Nguyễn begins with SAMPA /N/ (this sound is difficult for Spanish speakers to put at the beginning of a word), and is followed by something close to the English word "win".. The tilde ~ indicates a deep tone; it starts out low, goes down the pitch range, then goes up towards the end of the word.

Vietnamese, having developed an isolating morphology characteristic of monosyllabic languages, as evidenced by its rich tonal system and syllabic diphthongs and triphthongs designed to differentiate single-syllable words, nevertheless retains many features of a polysyllabic language, as evidenced by the fact that more than half of its vocabulary consists of multisyllabic and compound words.

1. Ngang tone: It has an almost flat outline with a slight dip at the end. It is also called bằng or không dấu. 2. Huyền tone: has the gradual F0. 3. Tone ngã: has a rising global pattern but is interrupted by a glottalization in the middle. For this reason, it is divided into 3 parts: a short descent, a silence, and a sharp ascent. 4. hỏi tone: gradually go down, then up to the original level. 5. sắc tone: It is called a rising tone because it has a slight fall at the beginning accompanied by a sharp rise at the end. 6. nặng tone: has a short descent interrupted by a glottalization. (Đỗ, Trần and Boulakia, 1998)

An example

This text forms the first six lines of Truyện Kiều, an epic poem by the famous poet Nguyễn Du, 阮攸 (1765-1820). Originally it was written in Nôm (with the name of 金雲翹), and nowadays it is also written in Vietnamese, quite frequently.

Trăm năm trong cõi ng manifesto ta,

Ch. tài ch. mSilencionh khéo là ghét nhau.

Tr margini qua m・t cu precedingc bі dâu,

Nh.ng đi isolationu trông hypocrisy mà đau đ marginn lòng.

L holy gì bifies s,c tmund phong,

Tr elevationi xanh quen thói má hıng đánh ghen.

• The first 224 verses (to see the next ones, click on câu 225 - 416etc.)

Spanish translation

Four twenty-two dozens, or... one hundred years in the realm of people.

within that short space of man's life,

Talent and Destination is to balance in bitter conflict.

Rotate oceans to the country's a desolate scene!

More gifts, less fortune, so it is law of nature.

And the blue sky is known to make pink cheeks envious.

Possible translation of Nguyễn Thanh Phong

(Trăm năm) trong (cõi) (người ta),

One hundred years in the world of people,

(Chữ tài) (chữ mệnh) (khéo là) (ghét) nhau.

Talent and Fate probably (hate) each other.

(Trải qua) một (cuộc bể dâu),

Experience hardship and suffering,

Expression: Cuộc bể dâu means hardship and suffering.

For example: The woman experiences the difficulties of her labor when she gives birth to her child. In Vietnamese it is said: She experiences one 'cuộc bể dâu'

(Những điều) (trông thấy) mà (đau đớn lòng). What you have seen is heartbreaking.

Note: Những điều trông thấy = Những điều được trông thấy = what you have seen

Lạ gì (bỉ sắc tư phong),

Her beauty and nobility is no surprise,

lạ gì: no surprise bỉ sắc: beautiful woman (old word) tư phong: nobility, distinguished people, especially those of good education and social class high. (old word)

Expression: Bỉ sắc tư phong in this context means noblewoman. It also signifies the fundamental negative and positive principle of life.

(Trời xanh) (quen thói) (má hồng) (đánh ghen).

God you have a habit of envying her.

Trời xanh: God, blue sky quen thói: have the custom of má hồng: pink cheek, but in this context it means a girl (colloquial word).

In Vietnamese, people say la hồng (pink cheek), gót hồng (pink heel), tóc dài (long hair) to refer to a young woman. đánh ghen: to envy

You have to combine the two sentences to understand correctly: Lạ gì bỉ sắc tư phong,

Trời xanh quen thói má hồng đánh ghen.

Means: No surprise, she is so beautiful and noble that God has to envy.

Note: This type of poem is called Thơ Sáu Tám or Lục Bát, which means Six Eight poems because the first sentence consists of six words and the second sentence consists of eight words. Notice the comma in the first sentence. It is necessary to read them in pairs to understand the meaning.