There are several asian languages that are commonly studied around the world
like mandarin japanese and korean one asian language that's less commonly
studied but is still an important major language
is vietnamese or as it's called in vietnamese
vietnamese is the first language of around 85 to 90 million people worldwide
most of them in vietnam of course while several million vietnamese people abroad
also speak it it's also the second language of 10 to
15 percent of vietnam's population since there are many linguistic
minorities in vietnam vietnamese is part of the mon khmer branch of the
austroasiatic language family it's by far the austroasiatic language
with the most speakers the second most spoken being khmer or
kamae as they call it the base of vietnamese
is mon khmer but similar to japanese and korean
vietnamese has undergone a tremendous amount of influence from chinese
vietnam came under almost continuous chinese rule for a period of around a
thousand years beginning in the year 111 bce around
this time or earlier proto-viet mong the ancestor of the
vietnamese and wong languages arose as we'll see later
vietnamese is a tonal language but proto-viet wong did not yet contain
any tones it might be tempting to conclude that
vietnamese adopted its tones from chinese but that's very unlikely
both the tones of chinese and the tones of vietnamese arose naturally through a
process of tonogenesis meaning that the tones arose
from other phonological features as the proto-vietnamese language arose
from proto-vietng it first developed three-tone
distinctions after this by the 9th century a huge amount of
chinese vocabulary began to enter the language
because the formal written language was classical chinese
with characteristic vietnamese pronunciation and attempts to write
vernacular vietnamese were made using chinese characters
today approximately thirty percent of commonly used words are of chinese
origin while in formal texts that rises to
sixty percent or even seventy percent for example this recent newspaper
headline meaning the price of jackfruit drops to the floor farmers suffer heavy
losses in this example 4 out of 8 words are of
chinese origin the system of writing using entirely
chinese characters was called or then after vietnam returned to
vietnamese rule under the ngo dynasty a new system was
developed in which chinese characters were used for words of chinese origin
and some native vietnamese words while newly created characters were used for
vietnamese words this system was called
the new characters were adaptations or combinations of existing chinese
characters or their elements but they weren't used in chinese we can
see an example of this in the name of this writing system
the second character exists in chinese but the first one doesn't
from the 15th century to the 19th century this system was used for writing
vietnamese literature such as the tale of qiu perhaps the most famous
vietnamese work of poetry also by the start of this period the
three tones of vietnamese had split into its present six
tones meanwhile classical chinese continued to be used for official
writing and amongst the elite this situation continued until the
french occupation of vietnam which began in the 19th century
french replaced chinese as the language of administration and the elite
and the french encouraged the use of to write vietnamese
the name of the script means national language script and is the current
writing system which is based on a modified latin alphabet
it was first created by portuguese missionaries in the 17th century but
didn't become widespread until the french were in power
french influence on vietnamese also took place in the form of loanwords
even though they may not stand out as french because of their vietnamese
pronunciation and spelling for example coffee cafe in french
meaning coffee in the word from meaning railway station
from fromage meaning cheese so me in the word comes from
meaning shirt from meaning soap as you can see a lot of the
french loanwords are common everyday words
but there are far fewer of them than there are chinese loanwords
one study concluded that ninety percent of loanwords come from chinese while
four percent come from french if you found the pronunciation of those
french loanwords disorienting then you've just experienced a touch of what
most learners find challenging about vietnamese
it's phonology while vietnamese is quite straightforward in other ways
its phonology is fairly complex standard vietnamese doesn't officially have
standardized pronunciation the hanoi dialect is sometimes thought
of as a de facto standard and is the variety used in most of this
video but there are many varieties with different pronunciation
including the dialect of ho chi minh which is obviously an important one
northern vietnamese basically has 19 consonants
while there are 23 consonants if we include all dialects
they're written with 16 single consonant letters 10 consonant digraphs
and one consonant trigraph that's a total of 27 consonant graphemes
meaning that some consonant sounds are written in more than one way
there are 11 vowel sounds written with 12 graphemes
as well as 28 or more diphthongs and 12 or more triphthongs
standard vietnamese also has six phonemic tones
meaning that different tones indicate a difference in meaning
the tones are flat mid ma low falling ma high rising ma low falling broken
ma low falling rising ma high rising broken
ma notice that each of these syllables is a different word with a different
meaning for example ma means the ghost while
ma means mom when you include all the different phonemes including tones there
are between 4 500 and 4 800 possible syllables in
spoken vietnamese depending on the dialect
and vietnamese orthography can represent 6200 different syllables
any syllable that appears in any dialect several learners of vietnamese whom i've
spoken to told me that learning to produce all the
different phonemes of vietnamese is really just a matter of practice but
that building listening comprehension skills is the bigger challenge
but not everything about vietnamese is difficult or complicated
its grammar is fairly straightforward vietnamese is an analytic language
meaning that there are no inflections and grammatical relationships between
words are shown through word order and by adding adjacent
helper words instead this means that you don't have to learn various forms of
words there are no case inflections no
conjugations no grammatical genders and no plural form
you just learn one form of each word people sometimes refer to vietnamese as
a monosyllabic language but that's not precisely accurate
many words have two syllables especially compound words that consist
of two independent words put together but if you separate those two pieces of
the word each of those pieces is normally a meaningful independent
word on its own those words that join together to form compound words don't
always have one syllable each but they usually do
also it's worth noting that more compound words are used in writing and
formal speech so there are a lot more monosyllabic
words in colloquial speech the basic word order of vietnamese is
svo for example the sentence meaning he ate
dinner here's the subject here's the verb and
here's the object adverbs usually come after verbs and
after the object of the verb if there is one
this means he ate dinner early adjectives also come after the nouns
they modify like this phrase meaning the nice
restaurant literally restaurant beautiful so do
demonstrative adjectives that restaurant literally restaurant
that possessives come after nouns as well
sometimes with a possession marker his restaurant literally restaurant
possession marker he the possession marker is sometimes
dropped when talking about subjects such as parents
home or school but in this case it's necessary
in equational sentences there's no verb meaning to be when the predicate is an
adjective this means hong is smart but when the
predicate is a noun or a noun phrase then the linking verb la is used
hong is a singer word for word the sentence is hong
is singer note that vietnamese does not have articles so this sentence has no
equivalent of the word ah the cardinal number is sometimes used in
a way similar to the english indefinite
article in this case it might be used to emphasize indefiniteness
this too means hong is a singer verbs in vietnamese always have the same form
there are no conjugations tense and aspect is expressed with time markers
that come before the verb this means he rides a motorbike
he rode a motorbike
he's riding a motorbike
tomorrow he will ride a motorbike there are also some adverbs that can be used
to show the action's relationship to time
sometimes alone and sometimes together with a time marker
he's about to come here tomorrow to borrow my motorbike word for word it's
he about to come here to borrow motorbike of me the main thing to note
here is that the verb itself never changes
another word is added to give information about time
let's go back to the present tense sentence and add something i'm going to
lie more just in my model this means he rides a red motorbike word
for word it's he ride one counter motorbike color
red this word here is a classifier or a counter
like a unit for counting nouns that differs depending on the category of
noun in english there's some limited use of
words like this like a pair of pants or sheets of paper but in vietnamese
they're much more frequently used they come after the number and before
the noun this one's used for vehicles and for individual items in a set of
items these are the most common counters this
is a counter for people for example meaning two americans
there's a different classifier for other animate nouns which are normally animals
i have a dog for inanimate nouns there are lots of different specific
classifiers but there's one very common one that can be used for most inanimate
objects in general
he bought two pens note that in each of these cases the counter comes after the
cardinal number and before the noun now let's look at a couple of questions
and possible answers and see what we find
this question means do you drink alcohol not go on zero
word for word it's you confirmation particle drink
alcohol negation marker yes or no questions are commonly formed using the
words which are also used to answer such a
question with yes or no comes after the subject and comes at the
end it's kind of like saying you do drink
alcohol no um no i don't drink alcohol
word for word no i no drink alcohol notice here that the negation marker
comes before the verb yes i drink alcohol word for word it's
confirmation particle i drink alcohol there's the confirmation
particle the same one that appears in the question
another question this time an open question man somewhere though
word for word it's you live in where i live in hanoi i live in hanoi
open questions are basically formed by substituting the question word for the
word that answers the question some question words
come at the beginning of the sentence and some come at the end
it's worth mentioning something about the personal pronouns these are
basically neutral polite pronouns but there are actually numerous different
pronouns to choose from depending on the gender and
age or social position of the person you're speaking to this is another one
of the challenging things for learners of vietnamese
on the easier side personal pronouns remain the same regardless of whether
they're a subject or an object the examples so far have been in
northern vietnamese but vietnamese has three main dialect groups
northern in particular hanoi central and southern
in particular the ho chi minh dialect naturally the northern dialect of hanoi
and the southern dialect of ho chi minh are both popular for learners and of
course there are differences northern vietnamese has six tones as we
saw before while southern vietnamese has five two
of the tones represented in writing are pronounced the same in southern
vietnamese so in northern vietnamese there's ma and
ma in southern vietnamese there's
also the general range of pitches used is higher in the north and lower in the
south even though the relative contours of the
pitches are similar another difference is that the letter d
and the digraph gi are pronounced z in the north but ye in
the south for example this word meaning easy in
northern vietnamese and in southern vietnamese another
letter that's pronounced as za in northern vietnamese is r in
southern vietnamese it's pronounced similar to the r sound commonly used in
english for example the word for alcohol in
northern vietnamese and in southern vietnamese another
difference lies in the letter v which is pronounced in northern
vietnamese but in southern vietnamese it's
at least in casual conversation for example the word for ticket
in northern vietnamese and in southern vietnamese
yeah also s and x are both pronounced si in hanoi and much of the north but in
southern vietnamese s
for example the word for excellent in northern vietnamese
and in southern vietnamese another difference is that the digraphs tr
and ch are both pronounced in the north in the south tr is pronounced and ch is
pronounced but these days more people pronounce
them the same there's also a significant number of
different words between the two varieties
we can see one example in this sentence from before
and here it is in southern vietnamese
notice the different word for pen this is just one example but there are
numerous different words like this as you can see vietnamese is a very
interesting language it may not be the easiest language for
learners to take on and its phonology may present a challenge
but in certain ways it's a very straightforward language if you've ever
been frustrated by cases in german or verb
conjugations in spanish then vietnamese grammar might be a
breath of fresh air and most learners say it's a fun
language to learn especially if you have a growth mindset and a long-term view
for the language the question of the day for speakers of
vietnamese how easy is it for you to communicate with speakers of other
dialects and for other people what's your
impression of vietnamese what seems challenging and what seems
straightforward this is the part of the video when i say thanks to the langfocus
patreon supporters especially these ones right here on the screen because they
are the top tier patreon supporters so many
extra special thanks go out to them and to everyone thank you for watching
and have a nice day
you