About the Vietnamese language

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]Imagine a language that for centuries has been influenced by another language from a different language family.

[00:00:08]Literally 60% of its vocabulary is from that other language. It has changed so much that it became challenging to even recognize its true origins. And that language is English. Yes, the vocabulary of English has 60% Romance origins despite being a Germanic language. But in this video, we'll explore another language that has been through a similar situation.

[00:00:38]Heavily influenced by language from a different family, absorbed [music] a lot of its vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar logic, but retained its core, which ultimately made it into something >> [music] >> unique.

[00:00:55]Xin chào. My name is Julie, and welcome to the Vietnamese language.

[00:01:03]Vietnamese or Tiếng Việt >> [music] >> is the official language of Vietnam, representing the Kinh people who make up about 90% of the population. It is native to around 86 million people plus 11 million more L2 speakers, making it the 21st most spoken language in the world. There is a considerable Vietnamese diaspora worldwide, especially in the US, where Vietnamese is the sixth most spoken language with 1.5 million speakers. Vietnamese has many, many dialects, and the more you zoom in on the map, the more dialects you see. But there are roughly three major dialect groups. The northern or the Hanoi dialect is the standard. The central or the Huế dialect is the most phonologically conservative.

[00:01:53]>> [music] >> And the southern or the Saigon dialect is highly influential due to south economic [music] power. The differences are mainly in pronunciation and some vocabulary, but the dialects remain largely mutually intelligible. As with any language, to better understand its present state, we must first turn to where it all began.

[00:02:18]Vietnamese belongs to the Austroasiatic language family, a vast [music] family stretching from eastern India to Vietnam, including languages like Khmer, Mon, and hundreds of smaller languages.

[00:02:32]The spread of Proto-Austroasiatic peoples, initiated [music] from either southern China or the Red River Delta around 4,000 years ago, was likely due to the invention of wet rice cultivation. [music] So, they were the original rice farmers.

[00:02:50]This Neolithic Revolution meant population boom. So, the Austroasiatics migrated all over Southeast Asia and reached India. Though subsequent migrations of Austronesians, Sino-Tibetans, and [music] Indo-Europeans layered on top of this initial Austroasiatic expansion. [music] The Vietic branch emerged somewhere around the Red River Delta in the [music] Austroasiatic core, so to say, around 2,000-3,000 years ago. It is associated with the Bronze Age culture of Núc Sơn under the rulership of the mythical Hùng Kings.

[00:03:31]This so-called kingdom of Văn Lang is considered to be the first Vietnamese state, though the population of this area was likely mixed. Nevertheless, the destiny of all of these people was coming from the [music] north. In the north, Imperial China was growing in power. The Chinese didn't bother to know how all of these southern peoples and tribes called themselves and what their differences were. For them, they were all just Yue. Literally, to the south of China lived hundreds of Yue or Baiyue.

[00:04:08]In 204 BC, a Chinese general fleeing the collapse of the Qin Dynasty established the state of Nanyue or South Yue, covering the territory [music] of more or less modern-day Guangdong province and northern Vietnam. Fast forward couple of thousand years of constant migration waves and rise and fall of the dynasties, and today the Guangdong province is ethnically 99% Han Chinese. But even now, the people of this area who are Han Chinese are still called Yue, and the Cantonese language spoken here is actually a dialect of the broader Yue language. I made a video on Cantonese, so check it out for more info on that. And now, just see what else happened with the word Yue because it's really interesting. The Vietnamese reading of the Chinese word Yue is Việt.

[00:05:03]>> [music] >> Nanyue or South Yue in Vietnamese becomes Nam Việt. Now, switch the two words. So, technically, Nanyue was the first iteration of the state of Vietnam.

[00:05:15]And for the long time, this was actually what Vietnamese historians considered to be true, but later on, with the nationalist movements rising, Nanyue became viewed as an invader state, [music] and the Vietnamese turned to the Hùng Kings and the Văn Lang state for a more ethnically [music] Vietnamese origin state. But well, the name remained. Another word for ethnic Vietnamese, Kinh, also comes from Chinese. It originates much later in the 10th-11th centuries and means basically capital. It was a term that the urban population of Hanoi used to differentiate themselves from the Cháy or the highlanders, who later became the Mường people. Today, the terms Việt and Kinh are used interchangeably to designate ethnic Vietnamese. In 111 BC, the Han Dynasty conquered northern Vietnam, beginning what would become over a thousand years of Chinese political domination.

[00:06:17]For the next millennium, Chinese was the official administrative language. If you wanted to work in the government, if [music] you wanted to be educated, if you wanted to read or write anything official, literary, or religious, you did it in Chinese. The impact of that was, of course, immense. As we said, around 60% of Vietnamese vocabulary today is considered to have Chinese origins, especially [music] words relating to government, education, philosophy, technology, and abstract concepts. Not only that, the language started to change structurally, becoming grammatically more similar to Chinese.

[00:06:57]>> [music] >> It became strictly isolating, that means lost all prefixes and any inflection whatsoever. It became monosyllabic. It used to be sesquisyllabic, which means something like one and a half syllables, and [music] it developed tones as initially Austroasiatic languages weren't tonal, and the Khmer language of Cambodia, for example, doesn't have tones.

[00:07:21]And by the way, I have a whole video on Khmer, so check it out. Throughout the 11th and the 19th centuries, the Vietnamese state, which was previously based [music] in North Vietnam, expanded southward in a process called Nam Tiến or March [music] to the South, conquering the Champa kingdoms of the Cham people, a seafaring Austronesian nation, who were also already Muslim at this point, and the Khmer, who used to inhabit the Mekong Delta up until the 19th century. In the late 19th century, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia became French colonies. With that, some French words, especially for food, clothing, and [music] modern concepts, entered Vietnamese vocabulary. Though Vietnamese adapted these polysyllabic French words to fit its monosyllabic structure.

[00:08:08]Chemise became sơ mi, gare became ga, cravate became cà vạt. You may have noticed in Vietnamese writings all of the different markings and diacritics above the letters that make the language look so intimidating. [music] Let's find out how all of this is actually pronounced.

[00:08:33]The first written language in Vietnam was not Vietnamese. It was Chinese. For over a millennium under Chinese rule, Chinese was the language of administration and education, written in chữ Hán, literally Han characters. Even after independence, chữ Hán continued to be used for all formal writings for centuries. In the 13th century, a new script, chữ Nôm, literally southern script, was created to write down Vietnamese. It was a mix of Chinese characters and characters created specifically for Vietnamese. The way these new characters were created was quite peculiar. They were usually a combination of two Chinese characters.

[00:09:14]One would convey the pronunciation and the other, the meaning. The monosyllabic structure of Vietnamese was more suitable for the usage of these types of characters compared to, let's say, Japanese or Korean, so they never developed a syllabary like those languages. The result was still quite a complex writing system, so obviously, only the elites could use it. The first text in Vietnamese is said to be an incantation composed in 1282 that was thrown into the Red River to expel a particularly violent crocodile. Since then, there were some famous literary works written in chữ Nôm, notably The Tale of Kiều, an over 3,200-line poem about a woman who has to sacrifice herself to save her family. But, as we know, today the Vietnamese language uses the Latin script. It was devised in the early 17th century by Portuguese missionaries who created this phonemic transcription of the Vietnamese language for themselves to be able to easily learn Vietnamese. Still, the Vietnamese script has traits of this Portuguese phonetic transcription like writing the sound "ng" with a combination of "n" "h". However, initially the script has seen limited use even within the Catholic community and Chữ Nôm was still the dominant writing system. In the early 20th century, the French colonial administration started to enforce the usage of this Latin script, the Quốc ngữ, literally the script of the national language as a means to firstly cut Vietnam from Chinese influence and secondly spread literacy across the masses and with that spread progressive narratives, which they thought would for some reason make people like the French more. They were indeed successful in both and with the progressive narrative spread the ideas of nationalism and anti-colonialism, which eventually led to the expulsion of the French from Vietnam in 1954.

[00:11:18]Modern Vietnamese uses 29 letters, 22 familiar Latin letters and seven letters with little extra, the diacritics. Add to that the tone markers and you will get that distinctive look of a Vietnamese text. In addition, since the script dates from the 17th century, pronunciations slightly changed since then and some letters are not what they seem anymore. This is actually a This is actually "z" and this is also actually "z" but in the south they would say "y".

[00:11:50]And the sound "d" is actually this letter. Consonants can combine to create sounds like this is "ph" and this is "ch" but in the south they would actually say something like "tr".

[00:12:02]Vietnamese is extremely rich in vowel sounds. There are 12 vowel letters in the alphabet and even more sounds are possible when adding tones. These are the flat tone "ba", the low falling tone "bà", the asking tone "bả", the tumbling tone which is pronounced with a little bit of a glotal stop "bạ", then the high rising tone "bá" and finally the heavy tone, a long falling tone that cuts abruptly "bà". Of course, the vowels can also combine into diphthongs and tripthongs giving Vietnamese its particular sound with loads of different vowel sounds. But, let's let the native speakers speak for themselves.

[00:13:31]Please tell me in the comments how does Vietnamese sound to you? Did you hear the difference between the dialects? And by the way, thank you to my top tier patrons for picking Vietnamese. You're the best and you too can vote on the next language right here.

[00:13:46]Now to the fun part.

[00:13:50]Vietnamese might be the purest example of an isolate language. A language where nothing inflects, nothing changes forms or tenses. Everything [music] is still and stable. All grammar is expressed in auxiliary words or word [music] order.

[00:14:06]Isn't it just beautiful? The word order is the strict and it's SVO. There are no articles or even number markings.

[00:14:12][music] Who needs that? Smart people understand everything from the context.

[00:14:17]Vietnamese also uses classifiers similarly to say Chinese or Japanese.

[00:14:22]You cannot just say a noun, you should first categorize it. Is it person, an inanimate object, maybe [music] a sheet?

[00:14:30]So to say these three white shirts, you'd say three inanimate classifier shirt white this. Notice how adjectives and demonstratives go after the noun.

[00:14:41]Since [music] every word is one syllable only and there are no prefixes or suffixes, Vietnamese creates new meanings by stacking these mini words together like a puzzle. Like this, vehicle plus fire becomes train and house park vehicle becomes obviously garage. Vietnamese also loves reduplication to create new meanings like >> [music] >> "ngày" day, "ngày ngày" everyday.

[00:15:07]Pronouns are probably the most mind-boggling aspect of Vietnamese.

[00:15:12]Pronouns like I or you do exist but they are used quite rarely. Instead, people address each other by kinship terms. You would call a woman of your parents' generation aunt or a slightly older man older brother. And you would refer to yourself not by a pronoun I but also by a kinship term that corresponds to whoever you are talking to.

[00:15:37]If you're talking to an older brother, then you refer to yourself as a younger brother or sister. [music] When meeting someone, asking for age is more important than name and asking elderly people their name is actually extremely rude. Just address them as grandpa or grandma. That will make sense.

[00:15:55]More or less, [music] right? If only that was it. In Vietnam, context is everything. Say you're dating a girl that is slightly older than you. You won't actually call her older sister.

[00:16:07]You should call her younger sister even though she's older because it is polite to lower woman's age.

[00:16:14]But if you also happen to work together in a professional setting, you should call her older sister, otherwise it's disrespectful.

[00:16:22]And then if you go to meet her parents and say she has an uncle who is younger than you, you shouldn't call him younger brother, otherwise it seems like you're not that serious about your relationship. You should see him from her perspective. He is her uncle, so that's what you should call him.

[00:16:41]Finally, let's discuss something that has been bugging me for years. Every morning when I wake up, when I brush my teeth, when I work, when I go [music] to bed, the only thing I can think about is why is everyone in Vietnam named Nguyen?

[00:16:57]Well, not everyone but around 40% of the population, which is nearly 40 million people.

[00:17:03]In ancient Vietnam, only nobles had surnames. There was a number of different surnames, Nguyen was one of the common ones. When a dynasty would change, the nobles who had the same surname as [music] that fallen dynasty would change their surname to avoid persecution.

[00:17:21]Most often they would default to Nguyen.

[00:17:24]In 1232 when the Lý dynasty fell, the Lýs changed their surname to Nguyen. In 1407 after the Hồ dynasty fell, the Hồs changed [music] to Nguyen. In 1592 the Mạc dynasty collapsed, more Nguyen appeared. In 1802, guess who became the new dynasty? The Nguyen. So people rushed into changing their family name to Nguyen even more eagerly to show loyalty. During the colonial administration, the French performed a census and assigned surnames to common people who traditionally had none.

[00:18:03]Nguyen by then was the most widespread surname already, so the French would assign the surname most often as well.

[00:18:11]Oh well, you can see how surnames are not that important in Vietnam. They used to change them back and forth based on the circumstances and they don't use family names for addressing people anyway.

[00:18:23]>> [music] >> They use given names which are much more varied. Vietnamese seems like it does things the opposite way of how English does them. But who knows? Now that Vietnam is experiencing an economic boom, more and more people might need to learn Vietnamese and [music] try to look at this world from the prism of the Vietnamese language. Maybe this person will be you.

[00:18:46]Thank you so much for watching and see you in our next exploration.