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)
“The language of the younger generation ... has the brutality of the city and an assertion of threatening power at hand, not to come. It is military, theatrical, and at its most coherent probably a lasting repudiation of empty courtesy and bureaucratic euphemism.”
—Elizabeth Hardwick (b. 1916)