Vietnamese is an Austroasiatic language spoken primarily in Vietnam where it is the national and official language. Vietnamese is spoken natively by around 85 million people, several times as many as the rest of the Austroasiatic family combined. It is the native language of the Vietnamese (Kinh) people, as well as a second or first language for other ethnic groups in Vietnam.
The Vietnamese alphabet is the modern Latin writing script or writing system for romanized Vietnamese. It uses the Latin script based on Romance languages originally developed by Portuguese missionary Francisco de Pina (1585–1625).
Spoken and written Vietnamese today uses the Latin script-based Vietnamese alphabet to represent native Vietnamese words, Vietnamese words which are of Chinese origin, and other foreign loanwords. Historically, Vietnamese literature was written by scholars using a combination of Chinese characters (Hán) and original Vietnamese characters (Nôm). From 111 BC up to the 20th century, Vietnamese literature was written in Văn ngôn using chữ Hán, and then also Nôm from the 13th century to 20th century.
A tittle or superscript dot is a small distinguishing mark, such as a diacritic in the form of a dot on a letter. The tittle is an integral part of the glyph of i and j, but diacritic dots can appear over other letters in various languages. In most languages, the tittle of i or j is omitted when a diacritic is placed in the tittle's usual position, but not when the diacritic appears elsewhere.
The phonology of Vietnamese features 19 consonant phonemes, with 5 additional consonant phonemes used in Vietnamese's Southern dialect, and 4 exclusive to the Northern dialect. Vietnamese also has 14 vowel nuclei, and 6 tones that are integral to the interpretation of the language. Older interpretations of Vietnamese tones differentiated between "sharp" and "heavy" entering and departing tones. This article is a technical description of the sound system of the Vietnamese language, including phonetics and phonology. Two main varieties of Vietnamese, Hanoi and Saigon, which are slightly different to each other, are described below.
Đ, known as crossed D or dyet, is a letter formed from the base character D/d overlaid with a crossbar. Crossing was used to create eth (ð), but eth has an uncial as its base whereas đ is based on the straight-backed roman d, like in Sámi Languages and Vietnamese. Crossed d is a letter in the alphabets of several languages and is used in linguistics as a voiced dental fricative.
Alexandre de Rhodes, also Đắc Lộ was an Avignonese Jesuit missionary and lexicographer who had a lasting impact on Christianity in Vietnam. He wrote the Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum, the first trilingual Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin dictionary, published in Rome, in 1651.
Phan Khôi was an intellectual leader who inspired a North Vietnamese variety of the Nhân Văn–Giai Phẩm affair, in which scholars were permitted to criticize the Communist regime, but for which he himself was ultimately persecuted by the Communist Party of Vietnam.
The Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum is a trilingual Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin dictionary written by the French Jesuit lexicographer Alexandre de Rhodes after 12 years in Vietnam. It was published by the Propaganda Fide in Rome in 1651, upon Rhodes's visit to Europe, along with his catechism Phép giảng tám ngày.
Jean-Louis Taberd (1794–1840) was a French missionary of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, and titular bishop of Isauropolis, in partibus infidelium.
Vietnamese poetry originated in the form of folk poetry and proverbs. Vietnamese poetic structures include Lục bát, Song thất lục bát, and various styles shared with Classical Chinese poetry forms, such as are found in Tang poetry; examples include verse forms with "seven syllables each line for eight lines," "seven syllables each line for four lines", and "five syllables each line for eight lines." More recently there have been new poetry and free poetry.
Đàng Trong, also known as Nam Hà, was the South region of Vietnam, under the lordship of the Nguyễn clan, later enlarged by the Vietnamese southward expansion. The word Đàng Trong first appeared in the Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum by Alexandre de Rhodes. Contemporary European sources called it Cochinchina or Quinam.
Đàng Ngoài, also known as Tonkin, Bắc Hà or Kingdom of Annam (安南國) by foreigners, was an area in northern Đại Việt during the 17th and 18th centuries as the result of Trịnh–Nguyễn War. The word "Đàng Ngoài" first appeared in the Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum by Alexandre de Rhodes.
Phạm Quỳnh was a monarchist during the late Nguyễn dynasty and supporter of adhering to traditional Vietnamese customs in the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. He was born near Hanoi, Vietnam, to a literati family of Hải Dương province. He was appointed Minister of Education to the royal court at Huế in 1932, and held several other posts in the court as premier and Minister of the Interior for Emperor Bảo Đại's government. He served as a government minister along with Ngô Đình Diệm under Emperor Bảo Đại's administration. After the August Revolution, he was killed by the Viet Minh along with two other high-ranking members of Bảo Đại's cabinet in September 1945.
The Lục Tỉnh Tân Văn was a Vietnamese newspaper published in Saigon. Although the title was Sino-Vietnamese, the newspaper was one of the first non-Catholic papers to use the Latin quốc ngữ script.
Girolamo Maiorica was a 17th-century Italian Jesuit missionary to Vietnam. He is known for compiling numerous Roman Catholic works written in the Vietnamese language's demotic chữ Nôm script, both on his own and with assistance from local converts. Maiorica was one of the first authors of original Nôm prose. His works are seen as a milestone in the history of Vietnamese literature.
B with flourish is the Unicode name for the third letter of the Middle Vietnamese alphabet, sorted between B and C. The B with flourish has a rounded hook that starts halfway up the stem and curves about 180 degrees counterclockwise, ending below the bottom-left corner. It represents the voiced bilabial fricative, which in modern Vietnamese merged with the voiced labiodental fricative, written as the letter V in the Vietnamese alphabet.
Francisco de Pina was a Portuguese Jesuit interpreter, missionary and priest, credited with creating the first Latinized script of the Vietnamese language, which the modern Vietnamese alphabet is based on.
Francesco Buzomi (1576–1639) was an Italian missionary in Vietnam. He was one of the first Catholic missionaries in Đàng Trong and, along with others such as Francisco de Pina, Girolamo Maiorica and Alexandre de Rhodes, belonged to the generation of Jesuit priests in the first half of the 17th century who established the firm foundation of the Catholic Church in Vietnam.
Nguyễn Văn Lợi was a Vietnamese linguist who served as the deputy director of the Institute of Linguistics at the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences.
