Vietnamese

Language Section Number: 331

How to register for Critical Languages Classes

Vietnamese is the sole official and national language of Vietnam. It is the first language of the majority of the Vietnamese population, as well as a first or second language for country's ethnic minority groups.

As the national language, Vietnamese is spoken throughout Vietnam by ethnic Vietnamese and by Vietnam's many minorities. Vietnamese is also the native language of the Gin minority group in southern Guangxi Province in China. A significant number of native speakers also reside in neighboring 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.

Vietnamese is an Austroasiatic language that originated in the north of Vietnam and is the national and official language of the country. It is the native language of the Vietnamese (Kinh) people, as well as a first or second language for the many ethnic minorities of Vietnam. As the result of Vietnamese emigration and cultural influence, Vietnamese speakers are found throughout the world, notably in East and Southeast Asia, North America, Australia and Western Europe. Vietnamese has also been officially recognized as a minority language in the Czech Republic. Vietnamese vocabulary has borrowings from Chinese, and it formerly used a modified set of Chinese characters called chữ nôm given vernacular pronunciation. The Vietnamese alphabet (quốc ngữ) in use today is a Latin alphabet with additional diacritics for tones, and certain letters.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Vietnamese Language", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.

CLP Tutors