Vietnamese is the official language of Vietnam. Approximately 59 million people speak Vietnamese worldwide. In addition to Vietnamese speakers living in Vietnam, a significant number of people speak Vietnamese overseas, notably in the United States (600,000) France (10,000), and to a lesser extent in Canada, Australia, Senegal, and Cote d'Ivoire (1992 statistics). Vietnamese is one of approximately 150 languages belonging to the Austro Asiatic family of languages.

Vietnamese Language Dialects
Vietnamese is spoken in three dialects, corresponding to the three main regions of Vietnam: Northern Vietnamese (Hanoi), Central Vietnamese (Hue), and Southern Vietnamese (Ho Chi Minh City). The Northern dialect forms the basis of the standard language and is the prestige dialect. The dialects differ mainly in terms of pronunciation and to a limited extent in terms of the vocabulary. These dialect differences do not impede intelligibility among speakers of the different dialects, however.

Written Vietnamese Language
While adopting many elements of the Chinese language, the Vietnamese people changed many Chinese words, gradually creating Han-Viet (Chinese-Vietnamese) which incorporated purely Vietnamese words. "Vietnamization" not only applied to the Chinese language, but also to French and other language groups, creating a diverse vocabulary for the Vietnamese language, according to the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism.

Vietnamese Language Tones and Speech Patterns

Vietnamese is a tone language; that is, the meaning of words and sentences is affected by the pitch with which they are spoken. The tones in Vietnamese are mid-level, low falling, high rising, low, rising after an initial dip, high broken and low broken. "Broken" tones are spoken in a glottalized manner.

There is no inflection in Vietnamese so nouns and verbs are not marked for things such as subject agreement and tense or number, grammatical gender, and case. Nouns are marked by special classifiers. There are classifiers that mark inanimate objects, animate objects, vehicles, books, people, and important people, for example.

Reduplication and compounding are common phenomena. In a reduplicated form, the entire word may be repeated or just a portion of it. Reduplication may indicate plural, extension, or repetition of a state or intensity. Names of birds, insects, plants, and fruits are often reduplicated, too.

Sentences in Vietnamese have subject-verb-object word order. Because there is so little inflection, the language depends on strict word order to convey meaning.

Keyword: Vietnamese, Vietnamese Language