vietnamese

Vietnamese (tiếng Việt) is an Austroasiatic language, belonging to the Vietic branch and spoken primarily in Vietnam where it is the 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 ethnic Vietnamese (Kinh), as well as the second or first language for other ethnicities of Vietnam, and still used by Vietnamese diaspora in the world. It is considered to be closest to the Mường language, both belong to the Việt-Mường branch.
Like many languages in Southeast Asia and East Asia, Vietnamese is highly analytic and is tonal. It has head-initial directionality, with subject–verb–object order and modifiers following the words they modify. It also uses noun classifiers. Its vocabulary has had significantly influence from Middle Chinese and loanwords from French. Although it is often mistakenly thought as being an monosyllabic language, Vietnamese words typically consist of from one to many as eight individual morphemes or syllables; the majority of Vietnamese vocabulary are disyllabic and trisyllabic words.
Vietnamese is written using the Vietnamese alphabet (chữ Quốc ngữ). The alphabet is based on the Latin script and was officially adopted in the early 20th century during French rule of Vietnam. It uses digraphs and diacritics to mark tones and some phonemes. Vietnamese was historically written using chữ Nôm, a logographic script using Chinese characters (chữ Hán) to represent Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and some native Vietnamese words that correspond to the meaning of the Chinese character, together with many locally invented characters to represent other words.

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