Vietnamese

Also known as: Vietnamese, Tieng Viet

Vietnamese (Tiếng Việt) is the national language of Vietnam, with ~85M L1 speakers plus ~5M diaspora across the US (Little Saigon CA, Houston TX), France, Australia, Canada, and Czech Republic — primarily descendants of the 1975 post-war refugee generation. It is by far the largest Austroasiatic language, sister to Mường (mtq) and other Vietic minority languages of northern Vietnam and Laos within the Vietic branch. Phonologically distinctive: 6 phonemic tones in the Northern (Hanoi) standard (level, sharp, hook, tilde, heavy, sharp-falling) and 5 in the Southern (Saigon) variety, with intricate interaction between tone and vowel quality. Written in chữ Quốc ngữ, a Latin orthography developed by 17th-century Jesuit missionaries (most notably Alexandre de Rhodes, who published the 1651 trilingual Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin dictionary) and refined into the modern standard during the French colonial era; chữ Quốc ngữ replaced the older chữ Hán (Han characters) and chữ Nôm (Vietnamese-coined Han-derived characters) tradition that had dominated for nearly a millennium. Approximately 60-70% of the lexicon is Sino-Vietnamese (Hán-Việt) loanwords, mostly from Tang-era Middle Chinese phonology, used heavily in formal/literary register much like Latin and Greek vocabulary in English.

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