Vietnamese Language
Vietnamese (tiếng Việt) is the national, official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of Vietnamese people (Kinh), and of about three million Vietnamese residing elsewhere. It also is spoken as a first or second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam. It is part of the Austro-Asiatic language family of which it has, by far, the most speakers (several times that of the other combined Austro-Asiatic languages.) Much of Vietnamese vocabulary has been borrowed from Chinese, and it formerly used a modified Chinese writing system and given vernacular pronunciation. As a byproduct of French colonial rule, Vietnamese was influenced by the French language; the Vietnamese alphabet (quốc ngữ) in use today is a Latin alphabet with additional diacritics for tones, and certain letters.
Read more about Vietnamese Language: Geographic Distribution, Linguistic Classification, Language Policy, Lexicon, Language Variation
Famous quotes containing the words vietnamese and/or language:
“Follow me if I advance
Kill me if I retreat
Avenge me if I die.”
—Mary Matalin, U.S. Republican political advisor, author, and James Carville b. 1946, U.S. Democratic political advisor, author. All’s Fair: Love, War, and Running for President, epigraph (from a Vietnamese battle cry)
“Our goal as a parent is to give life to our children’s learning—to instruct, to teach, to help them develop self-discipline—an ordering of the self from the inside, not imposition from the outside. Any technique that does not give life to a child’s learning and leave a child’s dignity intact cannot be called discipline—it is punishment, no matter what language it is clothed in.”
—Barbara Coloroso (20th century)