Vietnamese language

Vietnamese (tiếng Việt) is an Austroasiatic language primarily spoken throughout Vietnam where it is the official language. It belongs to the Vietic subgroup of the Austroasiatic language family. Vietnamese is spoken natively by around 86 million people, and as a second language by 11 million people, several times as many as the rest of the Austroasiatic family combined. It is the native language of the Viet people and functions as the second or first language for other ethnicities in Vietnam; it is also used by the Vietnamese diaspora worldwide. Like many languages in Southeast Asia and East Asia, Vietnamese is an isolating language (highly analytic) and is tonal. Structurally, Vietnamese is mixed between head-initial and head-final directionalities: head-initial is more prominent in clausal structures while head-final may appear more in compounds, and modifiers generally follow the words they modify but sometimes precede them as well. Syntactically, Vietnamese is topic-prominent and strictly subject–verb–object. It also uses noun classifiers. Vietnamese morphemes and phonological words are predominantly monosyllabic; however, many multisyllabic words do occur, usually as a result of compounding and reduplication. This aspect of Vietnamese allows for great efficiency in day-to-day writing, communication, and much more. Borrowings from Middle Chinese, known as Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary, make up a significant and important part of the lexicon. The vocabulary has also had influence from French. Vietnamese currently is written using a Latin-based alphabet known as chữ Quốc ngữ. The alphabet largely relies on 17th-century Portuguese orthography, 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 composed of Chinese characters (called chữ Hán) and locally created characters to represent native Vietnamese words and sounds.

Classification

Early linguistic work in 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, and various smaller 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 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– Mường subgrouping was established, also including Thavung, Chut, Cuoi, and others. The term "Vietic" was proposed by Hayes (1992), who proposed to redefine Viet–Mường as referring to a subbranch of Vietic containing only Vietnamese and Mường. The term "Vietic" is used by Gérard Diffloth, among others, with a slightly different proposal on subclassification, within which the term "Viet–Mường" refers to a lower subgrouping (within an eastern Vietic branch) consisting of Vietnamese dialects, Mường dialects, and Nguồn (of Quảng Bình Province).

History Austroasiatic 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. In addition to monosyllabic roots, it had sesquisyllabic 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 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 BCE, which is consistent with genetic evidence from Dong Son culture sites. Extensive contact with Chinese began during the Han dynasty (2nd century BCE). At this time, Vietic groups began to expand south from 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–Mường 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–Mường, underwent 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 the split from Mường around the end of the first millennium CE, the following stages of Vietnamese are commonly identified as Ancient, Middle, and Modern:

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