Vietnamese ( tiếng Việt ) is an Austroasiatic language spoken primarily in Vietnam where it is the official language . Vietnamese is spoken natively by around 85 million people, several times as many as the rest of the Austroasiatic family combined. It is the native language of ethnic Vietnamese (Kinh), as well as the second or first language for other ethnicities of Vietnam , and used by Vietnamese diaspora in the world. It belongs to the Vietic subgroup of the Austroasiatic language family.
56-439: [REDACTED] Vietnam portal The Central Military Commission ( CMC ; Vietnamese : Quân Ủy Trung ương ) is an organ of the Communist Party of Vietnam , which is the highest body in Vietnam on military policy and the ideological head the Vietnam People's Army (VPA) alongside the Ministry of National Defence , which is responsible for executive management of the People's Army and politically under effective influence of
112-636: A minor syllable occurred). These fricatives were not present in Proto-Viet–Muong, as indicated by their absence in Mường , but were evidently present in the later Proto-Vietnamese stage. Subsequent loss of the minor-syllable prefixes phonemicized the fricatives. Ferlus 1992 proposes that originally there were both voiced and voiceless fricatives, corresponding to original voiced or voiceless stops, but Ferlus 2009 appears to have abandoned that hypothesis, suggesting that stops were softened and voiced at approximately
168-447: A main vowel component followed by a shorter semivowel offglide /j/ or /w/ . There are restrictions on the high offglides: /j/ cannot occur after a front vowel (i, ê, e) nucleus and /w/ cannot occur after a back vowel (u, ô, o) nucleus. The correspondence between the orthography and pronunciation is complicated. For example, the offglide /j/ is usually written as i ; however, it may also be represented with y . In addition, in
224-474: A marginal Pnar dialect. Bhoi, from Nongpoh , and Nonglung from Umsning, in Ri Bhoi District , differ substantially from Standard Khasi in their word order . They are distinct enough from Standard Khasi to be sometimes considered separate languages, with Bhoi sometimes classified as intermediate between Khasi and Pnar, and Nonglung being part of Mnar, variously classified as a type of War or of Pnar. On
280-532: A process of tonogenesis , in which distinctions formerly expressed by final consonants became phonemic tonal distinctions when those consonants disappeared. These characteristics have become part of many of the genetically unrelated languages of Southeast Asia; for example, Tsat (a member of the Malayo-Polynesian group within Austronesian ), and Vietnamese each developed tones as a phonemic feature. After
336-626: A representative on the Government Council for Nationalities, an advisory body of the Czech Government for matters of policy towards national minorities and their members. It also grants the community the right to use Vietnamese with public authorities and in courts anywhere in the country. Vietnamese is taught in schools and institutions outside of Vietnam, a large part contributed by its diaspora . In countries with Vietnamese-speaking communities Vietnamese language education largely serves as
392-534: A role to link descendants of Vietnamese immigrants to their ancestral culture. In neighboring countries and vicinities near Vietnam such as Southern China, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, Vietnamese as a foreign language is largely due to trade, as well as recovery and growth of the Vietnamese economy. Since the 1980s, Vietnamese language schools ( trường Việt ngữ/ trường ngôn ngữ Tiếng Việt ) have been established for youth in many Vietnamese-speaking communities around
448-511: A stage commonly termed Middle Vietnamese ( tiếng Việt trung đại ). The pronunciation of the "rime" of the syllable, i.e. all parts other than the initial consonant (optional /w/ glide, vowel nucleus, tone and final consonant), appears nearly identical between Middle Vietnamese and modern Hanoi pronunciation. On the other hand, the Middle Vietnamese pronunciation of the initial consonant differs greatly from all modern dialects, and in fact
504-546: A third of the Vietnamese lexicon in all realms, and may account for as much as 60% of the vocabulary used in formal texts. Vietic languages were confined to the northern third of modern Vietnam until the "southward advance" ( Nam tiến ) from the late 15th century. The conquest of the ancient nation of Champa and the conquest of the Mekong Delta led to an expansion of the Vietnamese people and language, with distinctive local variations emerging. After France invaded Vietnam in
560-641: Is U Soso Tham (1873–1940), whose death is commemorated annually as a regional holiday in the state of Meghalaya. Khasi has a good presence on the internet, including blogs and several online newspapers. Khasi has significant dialectal variation, and this presents a challenge with regard to classifying the Khasic languages . Some dialects of Khasi include: In addition, Pnar , Maram (including Langrin) and Lyngngam have been listed as types of Khasi, although more recent studies seem to indicate that these are sister languages to Khasi, and that Khasi actually began as
616-632: Is also present in Welsh alphabet. Note A local legend tells of how the Khasi people received their script from God, and that subsequently the Khasi people lost their script in a great flood. In 2017, it was reported that there is evidence of an undeciphered script , currently stored at the Kamarupa Anusandhan Samity Library in Guwahati , Assam, that is considered to be Khasi in origin. Khasi
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#1732852628087672-516: Is also spoken by the Jing people traditionally residing on three islands (now joined to the mainland) off Dongxing in southern Guangxi Province , China . A large number of Vietnamese speakers also reside in neighboring countries of Cambodia and Laos . In the United States, Vietnamese is the sixth most spoken language , with over 1.5 million speakers, who are concentrated in a handful of states. It
728-557: Is an Austroasiatic language with just over a million speakers in north-east India, primarily the Khasi people in the state of Meghalaya . It has associate official status in some districts of this state. The closest relatives of Khasi are the other languages in the Khasic group of the Shillong Plateau ; these include Pnar , Lyngngam and War . Khasi is written using the Latin script . In
784-692: Is believed to have dispersed around 2000 BC. The arrival of the agricultural Phùng Nguyên culture in the Red River Delta at that time may correspond to the Vietic branch. This ancestral Vietic was typologically very different from later Vietnamese. It was polysyllabic, or rather sesquisyllabic , with roots consisting of a reduced syllable followed by a full syllable, and featured many consonant clusters. Both of these features are found elsewhere in Austroasiatic and in modern conservative Vietic languages south of
840-415: Is notated i or y (with the difference between the two often indicating differences in the quality or length of the preceding vowel), and after /ð/ and /β/ , where it is notated ĕ . This ĕ , and the /j/ it notated, have disappeared from the modern language. Note that b [ɓ] and p [p] never contrast in any position, suggesting that they are allophones. The language also has three clusters at
896-522: Is often mistaken for a tilde in modern reproductions of early Vietnamese writing. As a result of emigration , Vietnamese speakers are also found in other parts of Southeast Asia , East Asia , North America , Europe , and Australia . Vietnamese has also been officially recognized as a minority language in the Czech Republic . As the national language, Vietnamese is the lingua franca in Vietnam. It
952-464: Is pronounced with one of six inherent tones , centered on the main vowel or group of vowels. Tones differ in: Tone is indicated by diacritics written above or below the vowel (most of the tone diacritics appear above the vowel; except the nặng tone dot diacritic goes below the vowel). The six tones in the northern varieties (including Hanoi), with their self-referential Vietnamese names, are: Khasi language Khasi ( Ka Ktien Khasi )
1008-410: Is significantly closer to the modern Saigon dialect than the modern Hanoi dialect. The following diagram shows the orthography and pronunciation of Middle Vietnamese: ^1 [p] occurs only at the end of a syllable. ^2 This letter, ⟨ ꞗ ⟩ , is no longer used. ^3 [j] does not occur at the beginning of a syllable, but can occur at the end of a syllable, where it
1064-460: Is the first language of the majority of the Vietnamese population, as well as a first or second language for the country's ethnic minority groups . In the Czech Republic , Vietnamese has been recognized as one of 14 minority languages, on the basis of communities that have resided in the country either traditionally or on a long-term basis. This status grants the Vietnamese community in the country
1120-634: Is the third-most spoken language in Texas and Washington; fourth-most in Georgia, Louisiana, and Virginia; and fifth-most in Arkansas and California. Vietnamese is the third most spoken language in Australia other than English, after Mandarin and Arabic. In France, it is the most spoken Asian language and the eighth most spoken immigrant language at home. Vietnamese is the sole official and national language of Vietnam. It
1176-747: Is to supervise party affairs within the VPA, from the very bottom to the top, which is represented by the General Political Department . The Commission publishes the People's Army Newspaper together with the Ministry of National Defence . Vietnamese language Like many languages in Southeast Asia and East Asia , Vietnamese is highly analytic and is tonal . It has head-initial directionality, with subject–verb–object order and modifiers following
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#17328526280871232-571: Is written using the Vietnamese alphabet ( chữ Quốc ngữ ). The alphabet is based on the Latin script and was officially adopted in the early 20th century during French rule of Vietnam . It uses digraphs and diacritics to mark tones and some phonemes . 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 representing other words. Early linguistic work in
1288-446: Is written with two Chinese characters or in a composite character made of two different characters. This conveys the transformation of the Vietnamese lexicon from sesquisyllabic to fully monosyllabic under the pressure of Chinese linguistic influence, characterized by linguistic phenomena such as the reduction of minor syllables; loss of affixal morphology drifting towards analytical grammar; simplification of major syllable segments, and
1344-543: The Korku language in Central India and Vietnamese. He suggested that Korku , Mon , and Vietnamese were part of what he termed "Mon–Annam languages" in a paper published in 1856. Later, in 1920, French-Polish linguist Jean Przyluski found that Mường is more closely related to Vietnamese than other Mon–Khmer languages, and a Viet–Muong subgrouping was established, also including Thavung , Chut , Cuoi , etc. The term "Vietic"
1400-597: The Vietnamese orthography with the phonetic pronunciation to the right. Some consonant sounds are written with only one letter (like "p"), other consonant sounds are written with a digraph (like "ph"), and others are written with more than one letter or digraph (the velar stop is written variously as "c", "k", or "q"). In some cases, they are based on their Middle Vietnamese pronunciation; since that period, ph and kh (but not th ) have evolved from aspirated stops into fricatives (like Greek phi and chi ), while d and gi have collapsed and converged together (into /z/ in
1456-454: The phonology of Standard Khasi as spoken in and around the capital city, Shillong. Khasi, mainly spoken in Meghalaya, is surrounded by unrelated languages: Assamese to the north and east, Sylheti to the south (both Indo-Aryan languages ), Garo (a Tibeto-Burman language ) to the west, and a plethora of other Tibeto-Burman languages including Manipuri , Mizo and Bodo . Although over
1512-726: The CMC. Its membership includes some members of the Politburo and military leaders. The CMC is headed by a secretary . The Statute of the Communist Party of Vietnam says that the VPA is "under the party's absolute, direct, comprehensive leadership". The membership of the CMC is appointed by the Central Committee . The CMC is responsible to the Party's Politburo and the Secretariat . Its main priority
1568-561: The French colonial era. The following diagram shows the phonology of Proto–Viet–Muong (the nearest ancestor of Vietnamese and the closely related Mường language ), along with the outcomes in the modern language: ^1 According to Ferlus, * /tʃ/ and * /ʄ/ are not accepted by all researchers. Ferlus 1992 also had additional phonemes * /dʒ/ and * /ɕ/ . ^2 The fricatives indicated above in parentheses developed as allophones of stop consonants occurring between vowels (i.e. when
1624-710: The Red River Delta and into the adjacent uplands, possibly to escape Chinese encroachment. The oldest layer of loans from Chinese into northern Vietic (which would become the Viet–Muong subbranch) date from this period. The northern Vietic varieties thus became part of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area , in which languages from genetically unrelated families converged toward characteristics such as isolating morphology and similar syllable structure. Many languages in this area, including Viet–Muong, underwent
1680-519: The Red River area. The language was non-tonal, but featured glottal stop and voiceless fricative codas. Borrowed vocabulary indicates early contact with speakers of Tai languages in the last millennium BC, which is consistent with genetic evidence from Dong Son culture sites. Extensive contact with Chinese began from the Han dynasty (2nd century BC). At this time, Vietic groups began to expand south from
1736-471: The beginning of syllables, which have since disappeared: Most of the unusual correspondences between spelling and modern pronunciation are explained by Middle Vietnamese. Note in particular: De Rhodes's orthography also made use of an apex diacritic, as in o᷄ and u᷄ , to indicate a final labial-velar nasal /ŋ͡m/ , an allophone of /ŋ/ that is peculiar to the Hanoi dialect to the present day. This diacritic
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1792-488: The change of suprasegment instruments. For example, the modern Vietnamese word "trời" (heaven) was read as *plời in Old/Ancient Vietnamese and as blời in Middle Vietnamese. The writing system used for Vietnamese is based closely on the system developed by Alexandre de Rhodes for his 1651 Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum . It reflects the pronunciation of the Vietnamese of Hanoi at that time,
1848-577: The course of time, language change has occurred, Khasi retains some distinctive features: Before British colonization, some of the Khasi Syiems (Royals) used to keep official records and communicate with one another on paper primarily using the Bengali script. William Carey wrote the language with the Bengali script between 1813 and 1838. A large number of Khasi books were written in the Bengali script, including
1904-466: The daughter languages from distinctions in the initial and final consonants. Vietnamese tones developed as follows: Glottal-ending syllables ended with a glottal stop /ʔ/ , while fricative-ending syllables ended with /s/ or /h/ . Both types of syllables could co-occur with a resonant (e.g. /m/ or /n/ ). At some point, a tone split occurred, as in many other mainland Southeast Asian languages . Essentially, an allophonic distinction developed in
1960-442: The diphthongs [āj] and [āːj] the letters y and i also indicate the pronunciation of the main vowel: ay = ă + /j/ , ai = a + /j/ . Thus, tay "hand" is [tāj] while tai "ear" is [tāːj] . Similarly, u and o indicate different pronunciations of the main vowel: au = ă + /w/ , ao = a + /w/ . Thus, thau "brass" is [tʰāw] while thao "raw silk" is [tʰāːw] . The consonants that occur in Vietnamese are listed below in
2016-550: The famous book Ka Niyom Jong Ki Khasi or The Religion of the Khasis , which is an important work on the Khasi religion. The Welsh missionary , Thomas Jones , arrived in Sohra on June 22, 1841, and proceeded to write down the local language in the Latin script . As a result, the modified Latin alphabet of the language has a few similarities with the Welsh alphabet . The first journal in Khasi
2072-593: The first half of the 19th century, attempts to write Khasi in Bengali-Assamese script met with little success. Khasi is natively spoken by 1,038,000 people in India (as of 2011). It is the first language of one-third of the population of Meghalaya , or 997,000, and its speakers are mostly found in the Khasi Hills and Jaintia Hills regions. There are also small Khasi-speaking communities in neighbouring states of India,
2128-752: The largest of which is in Assam : 34,600 people. There is also a very small number of speakers in Bangladesh. Khasi has been an associate official language of some districts within Meghalaya since 2005, and as of 2012, was no longer considered endangered by UNESCO . There are demands to include this language to the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India . A sizeable number of books have been published in Khasi, including novels, poetry, religious works, school textbooks and non-fiction. The most famous Khasi poet
2184-884: The late 19th and early 20th centuries ( Logan 1852, Forbes 1881, Müller 1888, Kuhn 1889, Schmidt 1905, Przyluski 1924, and Benedict 1942) 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). In 1850, British lawyer James Richardson Logan detected striking similarities between
2240-446: The late 19th century, French gradually replaced Literary Chinese as the official language in education and government. Vietnamese adopted many French terms, such as đầm ('dame', from madame ), ga ('train station', from gare ), sơ mi ('shirt', from chemise ), and búp bê ('doll', from poupée ), resulting in a language that was Austroasiatic but with major Sino-influences and some minor French influences from
2296-427: The main syllable). When a minor syllable occurred, the main syllable's initial consonant was intervocalic and as a result suffered lenition , becoming a voiced fricative. The minor syllables were eventually lost, but not until the tone split had occurred. As a result, words in modern Vietnamese with voiced fricatives occur in all six tones, and the tonal register reflects the voicing of the minor-syllable prefix and not
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2352-497: The north and /j/ in the south). Not all dialects of Vietnamese have the same consonant in a given word (although all dialects use the same spelling in the written language). See the language variation section for further elaboration. Syllable-final orthographic ch and nh in Vietnamese has had different analyses. One analysis has final ch , nh as being phonemes /c/, /ɲ/ contrasting with syllable-final t , c /t/, /k/ and n , ng /n/, /ŋ/ and identifies final ch with
2408-542: The other hand, Sohra and War Khasi are lexically very similar. The Sohra dialect is taken as Standard Khasi, as it was the first dialect to be written in Latin and Bengali scripts by the British. While Standard Khasi is spoken by majority in Shillong, it is in turn significantly different from the other Shillong dialects (eight at most) which form a dialect continuum across the capital region. This section discusses mainly
2464-405: The plain-voiced stops became voiceless and the allotones became new phonemic tones. The implosive stops were unaffected, and in fact developed tonally as if they were unvoiced. (This behavior is common to all East Asian languages with implosive stops.) As noted above, Proto-Viet–Muong had sesquisyllabic words with an initial minor syllable (in addition to, and independent of, initial clusters in
2520-546: The same except that ơ [əː] is of normal length while â [ə] is short – the same applies to the vowels long a [aː] and short ă [a] . The centering diphthongs are formed with only the three high vowels (i, ư, u). They are generally spelled as ia, ưa, ua when they end a word and are spelled iê, ươ, uô, respectively, when they are followed by a consonant. In addition to single vowels (or monophthongs ) and centering diphthongs, Vietnamese has closing diphthongs and triphthongs . The closing diphthongs and triphthongs consist of
2576-465: The same time, according to the following pattern: ^3 In Middle Vietnamese , the outcome of these sounds was written with a hooked b (ꞗ), representing a /β/ that was still distinct from v (then pronounced /w/ ). See below. ^4 It is unclear what this sound was. According to Ferlus 1992, in the Archaic Vietnamese period (c. 10th century AD, when Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary
2632-534: The split from Muong around the end of the first millennium AD, the following stages of Vietnamese are commonly identified: After expelling the Chinese at the beginning of the 10th century, the Ngô dynasty adopted Classical Chinese as the formal medium of government, scholarship and literature. With the dominance of Chinese came wholesale importation of Chinese vocabulary. The resulting Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary makes up about
2688-505: The syllable-initial ch /c/ . The other analysis has final ch and nh as predictable allophonic variants of the velar phonemes /k/ and /ŋ/ that occur after the upper front vowels i /i/ and ê /e/ ; although they also occur after a , but in such cases are believed to have resulted from an earlier e /ɛ/ which diphthongized to ai (cf. ach from aic , anh from aing ). (See Vietnamese phonology: Analysis of final ch , nh for further details.) Each Vietnamese syllable
2744-567: The tones, whereby the tones in syllables with voiced initials were pronounced differently from those with voiceless initials. (Approximately speaking, the voiced allotones were pronounced with additional breathy voice or creaky voice and with lowered pitch. The quality difference predominates in today's northern varieties, e.g. in Hanoi , while in the southern varieties the pitch difference predominates, as in Ho Chi Minh City .) Subsequent to this,
2800-422: The voicing of the main-syllable stop in Proto-Viet–Muong that produced the fricative. For similar reasons, words beginning with /l/ and /ŋ/ occur in both registers. (Thompson 1976 reconstructed voiceless resonants to account for outcomes where resonants occur with a first-register tone, but this is no longer considered necessary, at least by Ferlus.) Old Vietnamese/Ancient Vietnamese was a Vietic language which
2856-418: The words they modify. It also uses noun classifiers . Its vocabulary has had significant influence from Middle Chinese and loanwords from French . Although it is often mistakenly thought as being an monosyllabic language, Vietnamese words typically consist of from one to many as eight individual morphemes or syllables; the majority of Vietnamese vocabulary are disyllabic and trisyllabic words. Vietnamese
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#17328526280872912-452: The world such as in the United States , Germany and France . Vietnamese has a large number of vowels . Below is a vowel diagram of Vietnamese from Hanoi (including centering diphthongs ): Front and central vowels (i, ê, e, ư, â, ơ, ă, a) are unrounded , whereas the back vowels (u, ô, o) are rounded. The vowels â [ə] and ă [a] are pronounced very short, much shorter than the other vowels. Thus, ơ and â are basically pronounced
2968-452: Was U Nongkit Khubor (The Messenger) published at Mawphlang in 1889 by William Williams . Khasi in Latin script has a different system, distinct from that of English. Khasi uses a 23-letter alphabet by removing the letters c, f, q, v, x and z from the basic Latin alphabet and adding the diacritic letters ï and ñ, and the digraph ng, which is treated as a letter in its own right. The diagraph ng
3024-487: Was borrowed) it was * r̝ , distinct at that time from * r . The following initial clusters occurred, with outcomes indicated: A large number of words were borrowed from Middle Chinese , forming part of the Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary . These caused the original introduction of the retroflex sounds /ʂ/ and /ʈ/ (modern s , tr ) into the language. Proto-Viet–Muong did not have tones. Tones developed later in some of
3080-473: Was proposed by Hayes (1992), who proposed to redefine Viet–Muong as referring to a subbranch of Vietic containing only Vietnamese and Mường . The term " Vietic " is used, among others, by Gérard Diffloth , with a slightly different proposal on subclassification, within which the term "Viet–Muong" refers to a lower subgrouping (within an eastern Vietic branch) consisting of Vietnamese dialects, Mường dialects, and Nguồn (of Quảng Bình Province ). Austroasiatic
3136-812: Was separated from Viet–Muong around the 9th century, and evolved into Middle Vietnamese by 16th century. The sources for the reconstruction of Old Vietnamese are Nom texts, such as the 12th-century/1486 Buddhist scripture Phật thuyết Đại báo phụ mẫu ân trọng kinh ("Sūtra explained by the Buddha on the Great Repayment of the Heavy Debt to Parents"), old inscriptions, and a late 13th-century (possibly 1293) Annan Jishi glossary by Chinese diplomat Chen Fu (c. 1259 – 1309). Old Vietnamese used Chinese characters phonetically where each word, monosyllabic in Modern Vietnamese,
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