Vietnamese, formerly known under the French colonization as Annamese (see Annam), is the national and official language of Vietnam. Vietnamese which is a mixture of Mon-Khmer, Thai and Chinese (cantonese).It is the mother tongue of Vietnamese people, who constitute 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese, the bulk of whom are Vietnamese Americans.

Older people often speak some French because many were educated during the colonial period while the younger generation are more likely to have English as a second language. .

Vietnamese is also spoken as a second language by some ethnic minorities of Vietnam. Much vocabulary has been borrowed from Chinese, and it was originally written using the Chinese writing system. The Vietnamese writing system in use today is an adapted version of the Latin alphabet, with additional diacritics for tones and certain letters.

As a result of a thousand years of Chinese domination, much of Vietnamese vocabulary relating to science and politics are derived from Chinese. As much as 60% of the vocabulary have Chinese roots, although many compound words are Sino-Vietnamese, composed of native Vietnamese words combined with the Chinese borrowings. Reduplication is a regular part of the language that usually denotes intensity. As a result of French colonization, Vietnamese also has words borrowed from the French language. Recently many words are borrowed from English.

The Vietnamese alphabet, called is the current writing system for the Vietnamese language. It is based on the Latin alphabet (more specifically the Portuguese alphabet) with some digraphs and the addition of nine accent marks or diacritics ÷ four of them to create additional sounds, and the other five to indicate the tone of each word. The many diacritics, often two on the same letter, make written Vietnamese easily recognizable.

The Vietnamese alphabet has the following 29 letters, in collating order:

A A å B C D Ü E æ G H I K L M N O ï O P Q R S T U U V X Y

Vietnamese also uses the 9 digraphs and 1 trigraph below.

CH GH GI KH NG NGH NH PH TH TR
These groups were formerly considered single letters and one can find them in older dictionaries. They are no longer considered single letters for collating and similar purposes; so, for example, "CH" will be collated between "CA" and "CO" in modern dictionaries.

The letters "F", "J", "W" and "Z" are not part of the Vietnamese alphabet, but are used in foreign loan words. "W" is sometimes used in place of "U" in abbreviations.

Vietnamese Phrases