Vietnamese Language

Vietnamese , formerly known under the French colonization as Annamese, is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of the Vietnamese people, who constitute 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese, most of whom live in the United States. It is also spoken as a second language by some ethnic minorities of Vietnam. It is part of the Austroasiatic language family, of which it has the most speakers by a significant margin (several times larger than the other Austroasiatic languages put together).

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.

Excellent lessons with simple Vietnamese phrases can be found below:

Vietnamese Language Center

While Vietnamese is a tonal language and not easy to master, local people will appreciate your efforts and will usually understand your communication from the context in which you are speaking.  If you are in a shop and say "How much?" in Vietnamese - even if the phrase is poorly pronounced the shop keeper will most likely understand that you are asking about the price of the item which you are holding or pointing to.