The term 'Vietic' was proposed by Hayes (1992), who proposed to redefine Viet–Muong as referring to a subbranch of Vietic containing only Vietnamese and Mường. Later, Mường was found to be more closely related to Vietnamese than other Mon–Khmer languages, and a Viet–Muong subgrouping was established, also including Thavung, Chut, Cuoi, etc. Vietnamese is shown as Annamese.Įarly linguistic work some 150 years ago ( Logan 1852 and Schmidt 1905) classified Vietnamese as belonging to the Mon–Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic language family (which also includes the Khmer language spoken in Cambodia, as well as various smaller and/or regional languages, such as the Munda and Khasi languages spoken in eastern India, and others in Laos, southern China and parts of Thailand). It uses digraphs and diacritics to mark tones and some phonemes.Ĭlassification A 1906 analysis map of Austroasiatic languages (previously known as Mon-Annam languages) by British linguists Walter William Skeat and Charles Otto Blagden. The Vietnamese alphabet ( Chữ Quốc Ngữ) which is based on the Latin script, was officially adopted during French rule of Vietnam. 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. Its vocabulary has had significant influence from Chinese and some from French. It has head-initial directionality, with subject–verb–object order and modifiers following the words they modify. Like many other languages in Southeast Asia and East Asia, Vietnamese is an analytic language with phonemic tone. 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.

Vietnamese is spoken natively by around 85 million people, several times as many as the rest of the Austroasiatic family combined.

Vietnamese (Vietnamese: Tiếng Việt, lit.'Viet language') is an Austroasiatic language from Vietnam where it is the national and official language. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols. This article contains special characters.

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