Vietnamese

About Vietnamese

Vietnamese is the official language of Vietnam, the first language of about 76 million people, and it is also spoken by large communities in the United States, France and Australia. It belongs to the Austroasiatic family and has borrowed many words from Chinese.

Vietnamese is tonal. The northern standard has six tones, and the marks above and below the vowels show them: ma means ghost, má mother, mà but and mạ rice seedling. It is written in a Latin alphabet called chữ Quốc ngữ. The letter đ is a d sound, while plain d sounds like z in the north and like y in the south. There is no single neutral word for "you". People address each other with family words chosen by age, such as anh (older brother) for a man a little older than you, chị for a woman a little older and em for someone younger. Xin chào is a polite hello with anyone.

FamilyAustroasiatic, Vietic
Native speakersabout 76 million (2019)
Official inVietnam
ScriptLatin alphabet (chữ Quốc ngữ) with tone marks
Tonessix in the northern standard
Codesvi (ISO 639-1), vie (ISO 639-3)

Speaker numbers: Ethnologue (2019), via Wikidata. Retrieved 26 September 2026.

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