Study Vietnamese

Study Vietnamese

Vietnamese (tiếng Việt, or less commonly Việt ngữ^[2]), formerly known under French colonization as Annamese (see Annam), is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of the Vietnamese people (người Việt or người Kinh), who constitute 86% of Vietnam’s population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese, most of whom live in the United States. It is also spoken as a second language by some ethnic minorities of Vietnam. It is part of the Austroasiatic language family, of which it has the most speakers by a significant margin (several times larger than the other Austroasiatic languages put together). Much vocabulary has been borrowed from Chinese, especially words that denote abstract ideas in the same way European languages borrow from Latin and Greek, and it was formerly written using the Chinese writing system, albeit in a modified format and was pronounced in the Vietnamese way. The Vietnamese writing system in use today is an adapted version of the Latin alphabet, with additional diacritics for tones and certain letters.

Vietnamese is the official language in Vietnam and is spoken by about 82 million people living in Vietnam and oversea.

The Vietnamese alphabet has the following 29 letters, in collating order:

Majuscule Forms (also called uppercase or capital letters)
A	Ă	Â	B	C	D	Đ	E	Ê	G	H	I	K	L	M	N	O	Ô	Ơ	P	Q	R	S	T	U	Ư	V	X	Y
Minuscule Forms (also called lowercase or small letters)
a	ă	â	b	c	d	đ	e	ê	g	h	i	k	l	m	n	o	ô	ơ	p	q	r	s	t	u	ư	v	x	y

Vietnamese also uses the ten digraphs and one trigraph below.

CH, GH, GI, KH, NG, NGH, NH, PH, QU, TH, TR

These groups were formerly considered single letters and are treated as such in older dictionaries. They are no longer considered single letters for collation and similar purposes; so, for example, CH will be collated between CA and CO in modern dictionaries.

The letters F, J, W and Z are not part of the Vietnamese alphabet, but are used in foreign loanwords. W is sometimes used in place of Ư in abbreviations. In informal writing, W, F, and J are sometimes used as shorthands for QU, PH, and GI, respectively.

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