DLI Vietnamese Language Course - Phonology

This is the Vietnamese Phonology Text of the 47-week Basic Course in Vietnamese. It was compiled prior to 1975. The text reflects usage as of that date. Emphasis is placed on developing the ability to understand, speak and read Vietnamese.

Graduates should be able to recognize and actively use all of the basic grammatical structures in the target language, to read a newspaper or magazine article and grasp the gist of it with limited use of a dictionary.

Vietnamese is the national, official language of Vietnam. It is the native language of Vietnamese people (Kinh), and of about three million Vietnamese residing elsewhere. It also is spoken as a first or second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam. It is part of the Austroasiatic language family of which it has, by far, the most speakers (several times that of the other Austroasiatic languages combined). Much of Vietnamese vocabulary has been borrowed from Chinese, and it formerly used a modified set of Chinese characters called Chữ Nôm given vernacular pronunciation. As a byproduct of French colonial rule, Vietnamese was influenced by the French language; the Vietnamese alphabet in use today is a Latin alphabet with additional diacritics for tones, and certain letters.

Vietnamese is spoken in: Vietnam

Vietnamese is also called: nnamese, Ching, Gin, Jing, Kinh, Viet