Origins
Based on linguistic diversity, the most probable homeland of the Vietic languages appears to have been located in modern-day Bolikhamsai Province and Khammouane Province in Laos as well as parts of Nghệ An Province and Quảng Bình Province in Vietnam. The time depth of the Vietic branch dates back at least 2,000 years.
The ancestor of the Vietnamese language was originally based around the red river area in what is now northern Vietnam.
Vietnamese was identified as an Austroasiatic language in the mid-nineteenth century, and there is now strong evidence for this classification. Today, Vietnamese is a monosyllabic tonal language like Cantonese and has lost many Proto-Austro-Asiatic phonological and morphological features. Vietnamese has also large stocks of borrowed Chinese and Tai vocabulary. However, there continues to be resistance to the idea that Vietnamese could be more closely related to Khmer than to Chinese or the Tai languages. Nevertheless, the vast majority of scholars consider these typological similarities to be due to language contact rather than common inheritance.
Read more about this topic: Vietic Languages
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