1. EleanorChin
May 6, 2016
CHIN 380 Dialectsof China
Vietnamese LinguisticAnalysis
Final Project
1
Vietnamese Analysis
The linguistic history of Vietnamese is quite rich and varied. It is an Austro-Asiatic, Mon-
Khmer language. While it draws much influence from Chinese, it is not Sinitic. Like most
languages, Vietnamese makes a clear distinction between colloquial use and literary use. The most
interesting linguistic aspects of Vietnamese are the phonology and the grammar.
In former days when Vietnam was controlled by China, Vietnamese was written in Chinese
letters, called Chu Han or Chu Nho. This system of writing was prestigious—in fact, the Chinese
characters for Chu Nho are 高級, meaning high-class. Eventually, though, Vietnamese scholars
wanted to create their own script using the Chinese characters as a base. Hence, the Chữ-nôm was
born.1 Chữ-nôm takes Chinese characters and combines them to make the sounds of Vietnamese.
It is even more difficult to read than Chu Han, due to the sound structure. Not many people can
read it now.2 The current writing system is called Quốc Ngữ. It is an alphabet comprised of
twenty-two Roman characters, derived from the French, and contains between nine and eleven
vowels, with an additional 19 diphthong sounds that arguably fall under the vowel category as
phones. Quốc Ngữ came into existence due to the French. An interesting point to note is that
Quốc Ngữ means national language.3 The story of Quốc Ngữ’s development is as such:
“In 1651, a French monk, Alexandre du Rhodes, published a phonetic dictionary of
Vietnamese sounds using Latin alphabetic characters. He called the written form Annamese, after
the French name for Vietnam, Annam. This system is still used in Vietnam today, and is
called Quốc Ngu. Quốc Ngữ has 29 letters, seven of which are modified by diacritics to produce
sounds native to Vietnamese but not commonly found in Latin-based or Roman languages.” –

2. EleanorChin
May 6, 2016
CHIN 380 Dialectsof China
Vietnamese LinguisticAnalysis
Final Project
2
(Michigan State Asian Studies Center Webpage) 4 But even though Quốc Ngữ is easier to read
and allows the literacy rate to grow faster, and despite its nationalistic name, it didn’t become the
standard writing system until the late 1800’s when France was still in control. But when it did
catch on, the country’s first newspaper got published—on April 15, 1965. 5 As of 2012, the
literacy rate in Vietnam hovered at 97 percent for both males and females.6
Vietnamese phonology is a hotly contested topic. First, there is the discussion of how
many vowels should be counted. Vietnamese has been counted as a 9-vowel, 10-vowel, and 11-
vowel language. But Vietnamese has many combination sounds, some of which are vowel-vowel-
glide sequences, therefore, a study by Giang Huong Emeirch at Penn State argued that Vietnamese
should count three such combination sounds as vowels, thus making a 14 vowel system.7 In
linguistics, an approximant is a consonant characterized by an obstructed vocal tract narrow
enough to create strong airflow but not for any duration of time, no matter how short, is the throat
obstructed. 8Emerich writes that “[s]ome approximants are considered glides because they are
approximants with vowel features, being more resonant than consonants…these glides, however,
are also similar to consonants because their vocal tracts are more constricted than that of /u/ and
/i/…In addition, glides behave like consonants because they can be devoiced after other voiceless
consonants, they can fill a syllable onset position when it is required, and they have less energy
than the vowels /u/ and /i/.”9
In contrast to the vowel study, there was a consonant study published in 2009, conducted
by Pham Thi Song Thuyet at Ho Chi Minh City University that highlighted consonant sounds in
Vietnamese and compared them the consonant sounds in English.

3. EleanorChin
May 6, 2016
CHIN 380 Dialectsof China
Vietnamese LinguisticAnalysis
Final Project
3
“Contrasting the two English consonant and Vietnamese consonant charts, we see that
there are more detailed and more categorizing criteria for manner of articulation in
Vietnamese. For example, manner of the articulation is divided into two manner of
articulation for stop and fricative, and then stop and fricative are divided into nasal stop
and oral stop (plosive), finally, nasal stop and oral stop are divided into unaspirated,
aspirated, voiced (lenis) and voiceless( fortis). However, there are less categorizing
criteria for place of articulation in Vietnamese than in English, for example, places of
articulation in English are divided nine criteria such as bilabial, labiodental, dental,
alveolar, alveopalatal, palatal, velar, glottal, labiovelar . In addition, In Vietnamese
consonants chart, there is more pay attention to tongue position (flat, retroflex, English
and dorsal) whereas there is more pay attention to other articulators such as dental,
alveolar, palatal alveolar in English consonants chart.”—( Pham Thi Song Thuyet,
“Consonants in English and Vietnamese”) 10
When people think about Vietnam, often, the first thing that comes to mind is pho. When
people think about the Vietnamese language, often, the first thing that comes to mind is tones.
Tones are prevalent in many Southeast Asian languages, and Vietnamese is no exception. Tones
in Vietnamese are the most noticeable aspect of phonology. There are five tones in Vietnamese,
Sác, huyền, hỏi, ngã, and nặng.11 Vietnamese dialects have complex tone systems that combine
pitch height and contour with sound types.12 By that we mean how high or low the tones are
combined with the length of sound create the system. However, this is different and significantly
less complex than Cantonese, because Vietnamese tones are not dependent upon the pitch height or
depth for meaning.

4. EleanorChin
May 6, 2016
CHIN 380 Dialectsof China
Vietnamese LinguisticAnalysis
Final Project
4
Vietnamese is quite similar to Chinese in that morphologically, it is a non-inflected
language and it relies on word order and context to give tenses. Binh N. Ngo, from Harvard
University, wrote The Vietnamese Language Learning Framework in two parts. In his first part,
Linguistics, Professor Ngo describes Vietnamese morphology as such:
“In Vietnamese each morpheme, which in phonetic respects in most cases is a syllable,
tends to form a separate word. The number of morphemes within a word is 1.068 .
Vietnamese is at the low end of both morphological scales, one of which measures the
degree of fusion (isolation - agglutinating - fusional), while the other one indicates the
degree of synthesis (analytic - inflected – polysynthetic)” (Ngo, The Vietnamese Language
Learning Framework, Part One, Linguistics)
Whether or not Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language is also up for debate. While the
Vietnamese lexicon is made up of monosyllabic words, there are many combinations that are
multi-syllabic that wouldn’t make sense to “break apart”. Wm. C. Hannas, the author of Asia’s
Orthographic Dilemma proposes that because Vietnamese used Chinese writing, and due to Sinitic
writing being monosyllabic in nature, Vietnamese retained that influence into its own language,
and now classifies its words according to the number of syllables. 13
For some reason, foreigners have a hard time completely grasping Vietnamese grammar,
which is surprising because syntactic structure relies on the word order and sentence structure in
order to convey the proper meaning. This pattern is similar to many other Asian languages,
Chinese included. Inflected languages use morphology to determine and express a tense, but that
is not the case with Vietnamese, as it is not an inflected language. Instead, they use particles,

5. EleanorChin
May 6, 2016
CHIN 380 Dialectsof China
Vietnamese LinguisticAnalysis
Final Project
5
context, and word order to convey their meaning. Particle usage is similar to Japanese and Korean.
Vietnamese people however, tend to only use present tense verbs and rely on context to imply
when the action was happening.14 The word order in Vietnamese is subject-verb-object. In
Vietnamese, the topic of the sentence, also called the Theme15, is placed in the front of the phrase,
and the focus of the sentence, called the Rheme, is placed in the latter half of the phrase.16
Vietnamese tends to put the newsworthy “new” information in the same syntactic place as the
Rheme.17 Normally, new information is placed at the end of the “information unit”; and thematic
prominence increases in direct proportion to the perceived importance of information.18
In conclusion, Vietnamese is a linguistically rich language, with many subtleties in the
phonology, morphology, and grammar.
Endnotes
1Donny Truong, “Vietnamese Typography” 2016, Web. Accessed 11 May 2016
https://vietnamesetypography.com/history/ Cited in this work: Thompson, Laurence. A
Vietnamese Grammar. (Washington: University of Washington Press, 1965), 52-54 N.B. This
work was written in Vietnamese, so Mr. Truong also translated the necessary information.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Michigan State University Board of Trustees University of Michigan Asian Studies Webpage
2014 http://asia.isp.msu.edu/wbwoa/southeast_asia/vietnam/lang_writing.htm Accessed 6 May
2016
5 Donny Truong, “Vietnamese Typography”
6 UNICEF Country Statistics, Vietnam, Updated 31 December 2013, Accessed 11 May 2016,
http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/vietnam_statistics.html
7Giang Huong Emerich, 2012. The Vietnamese Vowel System. ProQuest LLC. Page 2
8 Ibid. Page 7
9 Ibid Pages 7-8
10Pham Thi Song Thuyet “Consonants in English and Vietnamese” Ho Chi Minh City University
of Pedagogy English Department 30 Dec. 2009,

6. EleanorChin
May 6, 2016
CHIN 380 Dialectsof China
Vietnamese LinguisticAnalysis
Final Project
6
11 Marc Brunelle, 2009. Tone Perception in Northern and Southern Vietnamese. Journal of
Phonetics. 37, no. 1: 79-96 p. 2
12Ibid. p 1
13Wm C. Hannas “Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma” University of Hawaii Press, 1997, p. 77
14 Personal communication, 2 May 2016
15 Laroslav, “Blog On Linguistics” 27 August 2013 Accessed 11 May 2016
https://blogonlinguistics.wordpress.com/2013/11/27/theme-and-rheme/
16 Minh Duc Thai. 2004. Metafunctional Profile of the Grammar of Vietnamese. Language
Typology: A Functional Perspective. page 400
17 Ibid.
18Minh Duc Thai. 2004. Metafunctional Profile of the Grammar of Vietnamese. Language
Typology: A Functional Perspective. 397