Vietnamese phrasebook

Vietnamese (Tiếng Việt) is one of the most spoken languages in the world, with around 90 million native speakers. It is the official language in Vietnam and also spoken in places where Vietnamese have immigrated to such as the United States, France, Australia and Canada. It is also the native language of the Gin or Jing ethnic group from some islands off the coast of Guangxi province in southern China, who are ethnically and culturally Vietnamese but citizens of China.

Vietnamese is part of the Mon-Khmer language family. It is related to the Khmer language spoken in neighbouring Cambodia, but the two languages are not mutually intelligible. Vietnamese was more influenced by Chinese, while Khmer was more influenced by Sanskrit.

Vietnamese grammar is very simple: nouns and adjectives don't have genders, and verbs aren't conjugated. Vietnamese is a tonal language; the meaning of a word depends on how high or low your voice is. Vietnamese is not related to Chinese, but Classical Chinese was the literary language of Vietnam prior to French colonization, and the Vietnamese language contains many loan words from Chinese, even using Chinese-based characters as its writing system, called "chữ Nôm", until the French replaced it with the Latin alphabet. As a result of the French colonisation, modern Vietnamese also contains numerous loan words from French.

In modern times, Vietnamese is generally written in the Latin alphabet, with chữ Nôm mostly having fallen out of use, except for certain ceremonial and religious purposes.

Vietnamese is traditionally divided into three different regional dialect groups: North, Central and South. The Northern dialect, as spoken in Hanoi, is the prestige dialect that is used in news broadcasts, and all Vietnamese pop singers are expected to sing in the Northern dialect regardless of what dialect they speak. That said, if you are based in Vietnam's main economic centre in the South (around Ho Chi Minh City), the Southern dialect is what you will hear in everyday life. The Southern dialect also tends to be more prevalent in overseas Vietnamese communities, due to the Southern origin of most of the refugees who fled in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.