Vietnamese () 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 , a logographic script composed of Chinese characters (called ) 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.Ferlus, Michel. 1996. Langues et peuples viet-muong. Mon-Khmer Studies 26. 7–28. 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).Diffloth, Gérard. (1992). "Vietnamese as a Mon-Khmer language". Papers from the First Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, 125–128. Tempe, Arizona: Program for Southeast Asian Studies.
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: Ancient (or Old) Vietnamese (to ) Sources include the Ming glossary (, c. 15th century) from the Huayi yiyu series, and a Buddhist sutra recorded in an early form of chữ Nôm, variously dated to the 12th and 15th centuries. Compared with Proto-Vietic, the language had lost the voicing distinction on stop initials, giving rise to a tone split, and implosive initials had become nasals. Most of the minor syllables of Proto-Vietic were still present. Middle Vietnamese (16th to 19th centuries) Middle Vietnamese is the language found in Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum (1651) of the Jesuit missionary Alexandre de Rhodes. Another famous dictionary of this period was written by Pierre Pigneau de Behaine in 1773 and published by Jean-Louis Taberd in 1838. Modern Vietnamese (from the 19th century)
After expelling the Chinese at the beginning of the 10th century, the Ngô dynasty adopted Classical Chinese as the formal medium of government, scholarship, and literature. With the dominance of Chinese came wholesale importation of Chinese vocabulary. The resulting Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary makes up about a third of the Vietnamese lexicon in all realms, and may account for as much as 60% of the vocabulary used in formal texts.
Vietic languages were confined to the northern third of modern Vietnam until the "southward advance" (Nam tiến) from the late 15th century. The conquest of the ancient nation of Champa and of the Mekong Delta led to an expansion of the Vietnamese people and language, with distinctive local variations emerging.
After France invaded Vietnam in the late 19th century, French gradually replaced Literary Chinese as the official language in education and government. Vietnamese adopted many French terms, such as ('dame', from ), ('train station', from ), ('shirt', from ), and ('doll', from ), resulting in a language that was Austroasiatic but with major Chinese influences and relatively minor French influences from the French colonial era.
Proto-Vietic The following diagram shows the consonants of Proto-Vietic, along with the outcomes in the modern language:.
{| class="wikitable" |+ Proto-Vietic consonants |- ! colspan="2" | ! Labial ! Alveolar ! Palatal ! Velar ! Glottal |- ! colspan="2" |Nasal |* > m |* > n |* > nh |* > ng/ngh
! rowspan="4" | Stop ! tenuis | * > b | * > đ | * > ch | * > k/c/q | * > # |- ! voiced | * > b | * > đ | * > ch | * > k/c/q
! aspirated | * > ph | * > th | | * > kh
! implosive | * > m | * > n | * > nh
! colspan="2" | Affricate
| * > x
! colspan="2" | Fricative | | * > t
| * > h |- ! colspan="2" | Approximant | * > v | * > l | * > d
! colspan="2" | Rhotic | | * > r
The aspirated stops are uncommon and result from clusters of stops and *. The proto-phoneme * is also uncommon and has reflexes only in Viet-Mường. However, it occurs in some important words and is cognate with Khmu . Ferlus 1992 also included phonemes * and * in the inventory of Proto-Vietic.
Proto-Vietic had monosyllables CV(C) and sesquisyllables C-CV(C). The following initial clusters occurred, with outcomes indicated: *pr, *br, *tr, *dr, *cr, *kr, *gr > > > s *pl, *bl > MV bl > Northern gi, Southern tr *kl, *gl > MV tl > tr *ml > MV ml > mnh > nh *kj > gi
Lenition of medial consonants As noted above, Proto-Vietic had sesquisyllabic words with an initial minor syllable (in addition to, and independent of, initial clusters in the main syllable). When a minor syllable occurred, the main syllable's initial consonant was intervocalic and as a result suffered lenition, becoming a voiced fricative. These fricatives were not present in Proto-Viet–Mường, as indicated by their absence in Mường, but were present in Vietnamese until the 15th or 16th centuries. Subsequent loss of the minor-syllable prefixes phonemicized the fricatives. Ferlus 1992 proposes that originally there were both voiced and voiceless fricatives, corresponding to original voiced or voiceless stops, but Ferlus 2009 appears to have abandoned that hypothesis, suggesting that stops were softened and voiced at approximately the same time, according to the following pattern: > > v. In Middle Vietnamese, the outcome of these sounds was written with a hooked b (ꞗ), representing a that was still distinct from v (then pronounced ). > > d > > gi > > g/gh > > r
Origin of tones Proto-Vietic did not have tones. Tones developed later in some of the daughter languages from distinctions in the initial and final consonants. Vietnamese tones developed as follows:
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;" |- ! Register ! Initial consonant ! Smooth ending ! Glottal ending ! Fricative ending |- ! High (first) register | Voiceless | A1 ngang "level" | B1 sắc "sharp" | C1 hỏi "asking" |- ! Low (second) register | Voiced | A2 huyền "deep" | B2 nặng "heavy" | C2 ngã "tumbling"
Glottal-ending syllables ended with a glottal stop , while fricative-ending syllables ended with or . Both types of syllables could co-occur with a resonant (e.g. or ).
At some point, a tone split occurred, as in many other mainland Southeast Asian languages. Essentially, an allophonic distinction developed in the tones whereby those in syllables with voiced initials were pronounced differently from those with voiceless initials. (Approximately speaking, the voiced allotones were pronounced with additional breathy voice or creaky voice and with lowered pitch. The quality difference predominates in today's northern varieties, e.g., in Hanoi, while in the southern varieties the pitch difference predominates, as in Ho Chi Minh City.) Later the plain-voiced stops became voiceless and the allotones became new phonemic tones.
The implosive stops (, and ) were unaffected, and in fact developed tonally as if they were unvoiced. (This behavior is common to all East Asian languages with implosive stops.) These stops merged with the corresponding nasals (, and ) before the Old Vietnamese period.