{"id":114,"date":"2021-02-15T18:59:11","date_gmt":"2021-02-15T18:59:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/vietnamese\/?p=114"},"modified":"2021-04-11T19:04:11","modified_gmt":"2021-04-11T19:04:11","slug":"languages-people-use-in-vietnam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/vietnamese\/languages-people-use-in-vietnam\/","title":{"rendered":"Languages People Use in Vietnam"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Image by LOC TRAN from Pixabay<\/p><\/div>\n

You can easily guess the most common spoken and written language in Vietnam.\u00a0 Yes, It is ti\u1ebfng Vi\u1ec7t<\/em> or Vi\u1ec7t<\/em> Ng\u1eef<\/em> (Vietnamese)!\u00a0 Ti\u1ebfng Vi\u1ec7t<\/em> is both the national and official language of Vietnam.\u00a0 It\u2019s the majority language used to communicate by over 90 million Vietnamese in Vietnam, along with more than 4 million Vietnamese living overseas. Ti\u1ebfng Vi\u1ec7t<\/em> is the native language of the Kinh <\/em>people, the majority ethnicity in Vietnam. \u00a0It is also the second language of other ethnic minority groups in Vietnam, and the second generation of Vietnamese abroad.<\/p>\n

You may wonder how ti\u1ebfng Vi\u1ec7t<\/em> originated.\u00a0 It is hard to trace it, because through centuries it was influenced by a number of other languages such as Chinese, Muong, Thai, Khmer, and others. Basically, ti\u1ebfng Vi\u1ec7t<\/em> belongs to the Mon-Khmer languages in the Austro-Asiatic family.\u00a0 It is monosyllabic and incorporates tonal language.\u00a0 There are many dialects in Vietnam, but the most common are the Northern, Central, and Southern.<\/p>\n

Historically, ch\u1eef N\u00f4m<\/em> (Vietnamese ideographs) was considered the Vietnamese written language. <\/em>It was a Vietnamese invented script modeled after classical Chinese ideographic structure.\u00a0 It was widely used between the 15th<\/sup>-19th<\/sup> centuries by Vietnamese elites to compose their literary works.\u00a0 For thousands of years, however, until the early 20th<\/sup> century, ch\u1eef <\/em>H\u00e1n<\/em> (Chinese ideographs) were used in formal writing for official purposes, except for a brief period under the Ho dynasty (1400-1407) and Tay Son dynasty (1778-1802).<\/p>\n

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Calligraphy Master – Image by Ly Van Hiep from Pixabay<\/p><\/div>\n

The current national written language uses ch\u1eef<\/em> Qu\u1ed1c Ng\u1eef<\/em> (the Vietnamese alphabet). \u00a0Ch\u1eef<\/em> Qu\u1ed1c Ng\u1eef <\/em>was based on Romance Latin languages, in particular, the Portuguese alphabet, with the addition of nine accent marks \u2013 four to create sounds and five to indicate tone.\u00a0 Francisco de Pina, Gaspar d\u2019Amaral, Antonio Barbosa, Cristoforo Borri, and Alexandre de Rhodes were among the first people who advanced the Romanizing of the Vietnamese alphabet.\u00a0 Vietnamese consider Alexandre de Rhodes (1591-1660), an Avignonese Jesuit missionary and lexicographer, who spent six years in Vietnam as a Catholic missionary (1624-1630) as the \u201cfather\u201d of Ch\u1eef<\/em> Qu\u1ed1c Ng\u1eef<\/em>, <\/em>due to his publication of the first Vietnamese Catechist and the first Vietnamese-Latin-Portuguese dictionary (Rome, 1651). It marked the birth of ch\u1eef<\/em> Qu\u1ed1c Ng\u1eef<\/em>.\u00a0 In 1879, the French colonial administration of Vietnam proclaimed that ch\u1eef Qu\u1ed1c Ng\u1eef <\/em>would replace ch\u1eef H\u00e1n <\/em>in official documents, but enforcement of the change was not enacted until 1910.\u00a0 In 1918\u00a0Emperor\u00a0Kh\u1ea3i \u0110\u1ecbnh<\/a> abolished the traditional ch\u1eef H\u00e1n<\/em> writing system in the public education system. This organized a new educational system teaching ti\u1ebfng Vi\u1ec7t<\/em> as a first language to students and ti\u1ebfng Ph\u00e1p<\/em> (French) as a second language using ch\u1eef Qu\u1ed1c Ng\u1eef<\/em> in primary schools.<\/p>\n

Although ti\u1ebfng Vi\u1ec7t<\/em> is an official language and used by 90% of the Vietnamese population, there are fifty-four other recognized ethnic groups in Vietnam. Hence, there are many minority languages that are spoken by the minority groups in Vietnam including:<\/p>\n