Vietnamese language

Vietnamese (Vietnamese: Tiếng Việt) is an Austroasiatic language from Vietnam where it is the national and official language. Vietnamese is spoken natively by around 86 million people,[5] several times as many as the rest of the Austroasiatic family combined.[6] It is the native language of the Vietnamese (Kinh) people, as well as a second language or first language for other ethnic groups in Vietnam. It is split into three main dialects, Northern (Hanoi), Central (Hue), and Southern (Ho Chi Minh City).

Quick facts: Vietnamese, Pronunciation, Native to, Na... ▼

Vietnamese
Tiếng Việt
Pronunciation	[tiəŋ˧˦ viət̚˧˨ʔ] (Northern) [tiəŋ˦˧˥ viək̚˨˩ʔ] (Central) [tiəŋ˦˥ viək̚˨˩˨] ~ [tiəŋ˦˥ jiək̚˨˩˨] (Southern)
Native to	Vietnam China (Dongxing, Guangxi)
Native speakers	L1: 85 million (2019)[1] L2: 1 million (2019)[2] Total: 86 million[3]
Language family	Austroasiatic Vietic Viet–Muong Vietnamese
Early forms	Viet–Muong Old Vietnamese Middle Vietnamese
Writing system	Latin (Vietnamese alphabet) Vietnamese Braille Chữ Nôm (historical)
Official status
Official language in	Vietnam
Recognised minority language in	China (as Ging language)  Czech Republic  Slovakia
Regulated by	Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences
Language codes
ISO 639-1	vi
ISO 639-2	vie
ISO 639-3	vie
Glottolog	viet1252
Linguasphere	46-EBA
Areas within Vietnam with majority Vietnamese speakers, mirroring the ethnic landscape of Vietnam with ethnic Vietnamese dominating around the lowland pale of the country.[4]
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

This article contains Vietnamese text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of chữ Nôm, chữ Hán and chữ Quốc ngữ.

Like many other languages in Southeast Asia and East Asia, Vietnamese is an analytic language with phonemic tone. 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 Chinese and some from French.

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 to represent other words.[7][8] The Vietnamese alphabet (Chữ Quốc Ngữ) which is based on the Latin script, was officially adopted during French rule of Vietnam. It uses digraphs and diacritics to mark tones and some phonemes.