Vietnamese

A tonal Southeast Asian language written in the Latin alphabet, because missionaries got there before anyone standardised anything else.

What sets it apart

• The alphabet, quốc ngữ, was devised by Portuguese and French missionaries in the seventeenth century and became official in the twentieth, replacing Chinese characters.
• Six tones in the northern standard, five in the south, and the tone is written with marks above and below the vowel.
• No conjugation, no plurals, no cases, no gender. The grammar is carried entirely by word order and small function words.
• Around sixty per cent of its vocabulary was borrowed from Chinese over two thousand years, the way English borrowed from French.
• Almost every morpheme is one syllable, so compounds are built by putting single syllables side by side.
• The alphabet has 29 letters and F, J, W and Z are not among them. What was added instead is mostly vowels: ă, â, ê, ô, ơ, ư, plus the crossed đ.
• Spaces separate syllables, not words. Hà Nội is one word written as two, and a beginner reading a page cannot see where the words end.
• Tense is a word you drop in, not an ending you attach: đã for the past, sẽ for the future, and the verb never moves.
• You cannot simply count things. A classifier goes between the number and the noun, so three dogs comes out as three animal dog.
• Repeat a word and you change its strength. Đỏ is red, đo đỏ is reddish, and the trick is used constantly.
• Firms moving supply chains out of China have built heavily in Vietnam, which is why a language almost no foreigner studies keeps appearing in job descriptions across Asia.

What it opens

Six tones in the north, a Latin alphabet left by a Jesuit, and grammar with no conjugation at all. The words are short; the melody is the whole game. Phở at dawn, motorbike rivers, the fastest-growing economy in Southeast Asia: and a people visibly moved when a foreigner manages the tones.

Words with no translation

All the untranslatable words →

Vietnamese in the archive, next to the other sixty-six →