Overview
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Beyond Tourism
Basics
Vietnamese is the only official language of Vietnam and is spoken by the great majority (around 90%) of the population; those who don’t speak it are largely ethnic minorities in the rural highlands. About half of all Vietnamese words are descended from Chinese, but there is evidence of Thai, Khmer, and M™£ng influence as well. Vietnamese was originally written in Chinese characters, called ch n®m, which were adapted to fit the indigenous vocabulary. Seventeenth-century French Jesuit missionary Alexandre de Rhodes adapted Vietnamese to the Latin alphabet, using an ingenious system of diacriticals to transcribe the tonal qualities of words. The result was called qu#c ng (“national language”), and today it is the exclusive written form of Vietnamese. With the establishment of the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945, government workers and intellectuals expanded the vocabulary of the Vietnamese language to help it address the nuances of advanced scientific and political discussion
The language appears to be monosyllabic, but in fact multiple syllables, separated by spaces, can still belong to the same word, as, for example, with “tourism” (du l¢ch). For foreigners, the most difficult part of learning Vietnamese is the pronunciation. The language is tonal, meaning that the pitch at which a word is said helps to determine its meaning. Vietnamese has six separate tones, and Western speakers need substantial practice before they can speak in a way that sounds natural to native speakers. Additionally, certain distinctions among vowels are difficult for the Western ear to discern. Vocabulary and grammar, however, are significantly easier. Lengthier words have a modular quality, making compounds easy to remember: xe máy, meaning “motorcycle,” decomposes into xe (“vehicle”) and máy (“machine”). Grammatically, words themselves do not change to reflect changes in tense or case; instead, additional particles are added. For a tantalizingly cursory Vietnamese primer, flip to our Appendix and peruse the Vietnamese Pronunciation Guide and the Phrasebook .
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