Vietnamese language

Vietnamese, known natively as *tiếng Việt*, is an Austroasiatic language and the official language of Vietnam. It falls under the Vietic branch of the Austroasiatic family. Roughly 86 million people speak it as their first language, and another 11 million use it as a second language—together, this is many times the number of speakers for all other Austroasiatic languages combined. It is the mother tongue of the Viet people, serves as either a first or second language for other ethnic groups within Vietnam, and is also spoken by Vietnamese communities abroad.

Like many languages in East and Southeast Asia, Vietnamese is isolating (highly analytic) and tonal. Its structure mixes head-initial and head-final patterns: head-initial is more common in clauses, while head-final appears more in compounds. Modifiers usually follow the words they modify but can sometimes precede them. Syntactically, Vietnamese is topic-prominent and follows a strict subject–verb–object order. It also employs noun classifiers.

Vietnamese morphemes and phonological words are mostly monosyllabic, though many multisyllabic words exist, typically formed through compounding and reduplication. This trait makes the language highly efficient in writing and daily communication. A significant portion of the vocabulary comes from borrowings of Middle Chinese, known as Sino-Vietnamese, with additional influence from French.

Today, Vietnamese is written with a Latin-based alphabet called *chữ Quốc ngữ*. This alphabet largely derives from 17th-century Portuguese orthography and was officially adopted in the early 20th century during French colonial rule. It uses digraphs and diacritics to mark tones and certain phonemes. Historically, Vietnamese was written with *chữ Nôm*, a logographic script that combined Chinese characters (*chữ Hán*) with locally created characters to represent native Vietnamese words and sounds.

**Classification**

Early linguistic studies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (by scholars such as Logan, Forbes, Müller, Kuhn, Schmidt, Przyluski, and Benedict) placed Vietnamese in the Mon–Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic family, which also includes Khmer (spoken in Cambodia) and smaller languages like Munda and Khasi in eastern India, as well as others in Laos, southern China, and parts of Thailand. In 1850, British lawyer James Richardson Logan noticed strong similarities between the Korku language of central India and Vietnamese, and in 1856 he proposed grouping Korku, Mon, and Vietnamese as "Mon–Annam languages." Later, in 1920, French-Polish linguist Jean Przyluski found that Mường is more closely related to Vietnamese than other Mon–Khmer languages, leading to a Viet–Mường subgroup that also includes Thavung, Chut, Cuoi, and others. The term "Vietic" was introduced by Hayes in 1992, who redefined Viet–Mường as a subbranch of Vietic containing only Vietnamese and Mường. Gérard Diffloth and others use "Vietic" with a slightly different classification, where "Viet–Mường" refers to a lower subgroup within an eastern Vietic branch, comprising Vietnamese dialects, Mường dialects, and Nguồn (from Quảng Bình Province).

**History**

Austroasiatic is thought to have spread around 2000 BC. The arrival of the agricultural Phùng Nguyên culture in the Red River Delta around that time may correspond to the Vietic branch. This early Vietic language was typologically very different from later Vietnamese. Besides monosyllabic roots, it had sesquisyllabic roots (a reduced syllable followed by a full syllable) and many consonant clusters—features still found in other Austroasiatic languages and in conservative Vietic languages south of the Red River area. It was non-tonal but had glottal stop and voiceless fricative codas.

Borrowed vocabulary suggests early contact with Tai language speakers in the last millennium BCE, consistent with genetic evidence from Dong Son culture sites. Extensive contact with Chinese began during the Han dynasty (2nd century BCE). Around this time, Vietic groups started expanding south from the Red River Delta into nearby uplands, possibly to avoid Chinese encroachment. The oldest layer of Chinese loanwords into northern Vietic (which would become the Viet–Mường subbranch) dates from this period.

Northern Vietic varieties thus became part of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, where unrelated languages converged toward isolating morphology and similar syllable structures. Many languages in this area, including Viet–Mường, underwent tonogenesis: distinctions once expressed by final consonants became phonemic tonal distinctions when those consonants disappeared. This process affected many unrelated Southeast Asian languages; for example, Tsat (a Malayo-Polynesian language within Austronesian) and Vietnamese both developed tones as phonemic features.

After splitting from Mường around the end of the first millennium CE, Vietnamese is commonly divided into Ancient, Middle, and Modern stages. Ancient (or Old) Vietnamese (up to around 1500) is known from sources such as the Ming glossary *Ānnánguó yìyǔ* (c. 15th century) and a Buddhist sutra written in an early form of *chữ Nôm* (dated to the 12th or 15th century). Compared to Proto-Vietic, this stage had lost the voicing distinction on stop initials, causing a tone split, and implosive initials had become nasals. Most of the minor syllables of Proto-Vietic were...