At l’Atelier An Phu, we believe that learning a language is not just about memorizing words-it’s about understanding the stories, influences, and identities that shape how people speak.
The Vietnamese language, tiếng Việt, offers a rich and complex case. It is the result of centuries of contact, colonization, resistance, and adaptation. Beneath the surface of the Roman letters and musical tones lies a cultural journey that reflects Vietnam’s own.
The Austroasiatic Foundation and Chinese Domination
Vietnamese is a member of the Austroasiatic language family, which includes Khmer and several tribal languages in Southeast Asia and northeastern India. The oldest known ancestors of the Vietnamese people, the Lạc Việt, inhabited the Red River Delta region as early as the first millennium BCE. Linguistic evidence suggests that their language already contained basic Austroasiatic vocabulary and structures: monosyllabic roots, subject-verb-object word order, and a lack of inflection.
When the Chinese Han Empire invaded northern Vietnam in 111 BCE, it began over a thousand years of domination (until 939 CE). During this period, Chinese (Classical Chinese or chữ Hán) became the language of administration, education, and literature.
However, the spoken language of the Vietnamese people remained distinct and persisted orally through everyday use. This diglossia-the coexistence of two languages for different functions-lasted for centuries. Vietnamese absorbed a vast number of Chinese words (by some estimates, 60% of the lexicon used in formal or intellectual contexts today), but maintained Austroasiatic grammatical structure.
Source : https://vie.shisu.edu.cn/resources/news/content11637
To express spoken Vietnamese in writing, Vietnamese scholars began adapting Chinese characters into a native logographic system called chữ Nôm starting from the 10th century. Chữ Nôm combined borrowed Chinese characters with new, invented characters to represent native Vietnamese words phonetically and semantically. Though highly expressive, chữ Nôm was difficult to standardize and teach, limiting literacy to the elite.
Missionaries and the Birth of the Romanized Script
The first attempts to transcribe Vietnamese using the Latin alphabet came with European missionaries in the 17th century. It is commonly believed that French missionaries were the pioneers of Romanization, but in fact, the earliest efforts were led by Portuguese and Italian Jesuits.
The first known figure to study and transcribe Vietnamese was Francisco de Pina, a Portuguese Jesuit based in Hoi An. Around 1620, he began documenting the language and devising a phonetic transcription system using the Roman alphabet. His work laid the foundation for what would become quốc ngữ, the Romanized Vietnamese script.
Italian Jesuits like Cristoforo Borri and Girolamo Maiorica continued this effort, writing religious texts in Vietnamese for local converts. But the most influential contributor was Alexandre de Rhodes, a French Jesuit who arrived in Vietnam in 1627.
Building on de Pina’s system, de Rhodes developed a more refined and systematic orthography. In 1651, he published two key works in Rome: a Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin dictionary (Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum) and a Vietnamese catechism, both using quốc ngữ.
His work marked the beginning of the Roman script as a serious alternative to chữ Nôm, though its use remained limited to missionary circles for the next two centuries.
The French Colonial Period and the Rise of Quốc Ngữ
When France began its conquest of Vietnam in 1858, leading to full colonial control by 1885, the colonial administration found chữ Nôm impractical for governance and education. By promoting quốc ngữ, French authorities aimed to increase literacy, facilitate communication, and weaken the cultural hold of the Chinese script.
By the early 20th century, quốc ngữ was being taught in colonial schools and used in newspapers. Ironically, this policy helped ignite Vietnamese nationalism, as the new literate classes used the script to write anti-colonial tracts, novels, and political essays. Following independence and the division of Vietnam in 1954, both North and South Vietnam declared quốc ngữ the official writing system. The transition was complete.
French left a visible mark on the language, especially in vocabulary. While precise percentages vary depending on criteria, about 5% of everyday Vietnamese vocabulary today comes directly from French, particularly in fields such as technology, education, cuisine, transport, fashion, and administration. Some common examples include:
ga (from gare, train station)
sôcôla (from chocolat, chocolate)
búp bê (from poupée, doll)
ma-dăm (from madame)
cà phê (from café)
xe buýt (from bus)
pho mát (from fromage, cheese)
These words are pronounced in a Vietnamese phonetic structure and are fully integrated into the modern language.
A Living Language: From Revolution to Globalization
Modern Vietnamese, as spoken today, is a product of this long history of convergence and change. It carries the syntactic heritage of its Austroasiatic roots, the lexical depth of Chinese influence, and the colonial imprint of French.
In recent decades, globalization and digital communication have introduced a new wave of loanwords from English, especially in youth culture, business, and technology.
Vietnamese remains a tonal language, with six tones in northern dialects (Hanoi) and five in southern ones (Ho Chi Minh City). These tones are essential to meaning and are expressed using diacritics in writing.
Today, Vietnamese is not only a national language-it is also a global language. With Vietnam’s population recently surpassing 100 million, and with an estimated over 90 million native speakers and 5 to 6 million speakers abroad, tiếng Việt is one of the most spoken languages in the world.
As for the current era of the language, we might call it the digital era, characterized by online communication, linguistic hybridization, and a revival of interest in regional dialects and traditional expressions. Vietnamese is evolving faster than ever-new slang, social media terms, and borrowed English expressions are reshaping how people talk, especially among younger generations.
FAQ
There are around 95-100 million native speakers, almost all of them in Vietnam. The Vietnamese diaspora adds another 5-6 million speakers, especially in the United States, France, Australia, Canada, Germany, and Japan.
Vietnamese grammar is relatively simple: there are no verb conjugations, noun genders, or articles. However, the tonal system and pronunciation can be challenging for new learners. Once you grasp the tones and sounds, the rest becomes much more approachable.
Yes. The three main regional dialects are Northern (Hanoi), Central (Hue), and Southern (Ho Chi Minh City). Differences exist in pronunciation, vocabulary, and intonation. Most Vietnamese learners begin with the Hanoi dialect, which is used in education and official media.
Vietnamese used chữ Hán (Classical Chinese) for official documents and chữ Nôm for writing the vernacular language. Both were logographic systems based on Chinese characters, and both are now considered obsolete, though chữ Nôm is studied by scholars and preserved in traditional texts.
Because Vietnam was a tributary state of China for a thousand years and a French colony for nearly a century, many Chinese and French terms entered the language. Chinese words dominate in formal and academic contexts, while French borrowings are common in everyday vocabulary.
