The little language lexicon: the Vietnamese language

The Vietnamese language belongs to the Mon-Khmer languages within the Austroasiatic language family. It has been little studied by linguists, since Vietnam was very isolated after the Vietnam War until the 1980s. Vietnamese is a tonal language and a monosyllabic language.

A tonal language (like the Chinese languages, for example) is characterised by the fact that a change in pitch or pitch contour within a syllable changes the meaning of the word. Standard Chinese, for example, has four tones; Vietnamese even has six. It is assumed that the tones entered the Vietnamese language in the first millennium under the influence of the Chinese languages.

Originally, every word in Vietnamese consisted of just one syllable (monosyllabic language). Today the basic vocabulary is still monosyllabic, but over time two-syllable words have been added. These two-syllable words are written as two separate syllables, each of which corresponds to an existing word. For example, the word for “furniture” is made up of “table” and “chair” (bàn ghế (槃椅)), and the word for “tear” of “water” and “eye” (nước mắt (渃眜)).

Around 70% of Vietnamese vocabulary is of Chinese origin, although Vietnamese is not related to the Chinese languages. These words are often two-syllable too.

French words were also adopted into Vietnamese as a result of French colonial rule. For example, the word “fromage” (cheese) entered the language as “pho mat”, and the word “pain” (bread) as “bánh”.

Words with complex, especially technical, meanings often consist of more than two syllables, as they are descriptive paraphrases. For example, “máy thu thanh” (“machine-collect-sound”) means radio.

Vietnamese has three main dialects: a northern Vietnamese dialect (Hanoi dialect),  a central Vietnamese dialect (Huế dialect) and a southern Vietnamese dialect (Saigon dialect). The main difference between these dialects lies almost exclusively in how the six tones are pronounced.

Facts about the Vietnamese language:

• Spoken in: Vietnam, USA, China, Cambodia, Laos, France, Australia, Germany
• Official language in: Vietnam
• Speakers: approx. 84 million (native speakers), approx. 10 million second-language speakers
• Language codes: vi (ISO 639-1), vie (ISO 639-2), vie (ISO 639-3)
• Linguistic classification: Austroasiatic languages - Mon-Khmer languages - Việt-Mường languages - Vietnamese

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