Vietnamese

Also known as tiếng Việt, Vietnamese language, vie

Austroasiatic language originating in Vietnam

AI overview

Vietnamese is a language originally from Vietnam that belongs to the Austroasiatic language family. It matters because it is the primary language spoken by millions of people in Vietnam and Vietnamese diaspora communities around the world.

AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.

Wikidata facts

Instance of: modern language
Subclass of: Vietic
Country: Vietnam
Image: I speak Vietnamese.svg

Show 19 more facts

writing system: Latin script
indigenous to: Guangxi
Stack Exchange tag: tex.stackexchange.com/tags/vietnamese
linguistic typology: isolating language
topic's main category: Category:Vietnamese language
Commons category: Vietnamese language
short name: вьетнамаг
category for films in this language: Category:Vietnamese-language films
Wikimedia language code: vi
native label: Tiếng Việt
studied by: Vietnamese studies
described at URL: lpan.eva.mpg.de/austronesian/language.php?id=666
exact match: publications.europa.eu/resource/authority/language/VIE
P10369: rakfisk
number of speakers, writers, or signers: 68058620
entry in abbreviations table: вьетн.
on focus list of Wikimedia project: Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/4
has tense: future tense
female form of label: la langue vietnamienne

Sources (8)

via Wikidata · CC0

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Encyclopedic overview

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.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Vietnamese” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.