Vietnamese language


Vietnamese is an Austroasiatic language primarily spoken in Vietnam where it is the official language. It belongs to the Vietic subgroup of the Austroasiatic language family. Vietnamese is spoken natively by around 86 million people, and as a second language by 11 million people, several times as many as the rest of the Austroasiatic family combined. It is the native language of ethnic Vietnamese, as well as the second or first language for other ethnicities of Vietnam, and is used by Vietnamese diaspora in the world.
Like many languages in Southeast Asia and East Asia, Vietnamese is an isolating language and is tonal. It has head-initial directionality, with subject–verb–object order and modifiers following the words they modify. It also uses noun classifiers. Its vocabulary has had significant influence from Middle Chinese and French. Vietnamese morphemes and phonological words are predominantly monosyllabic, however many multisyllabic words do occur, usually as a result of compounding and reduplication.
Vietnamese is written using the Vietnamese alphabet. The alphabet is based on the Latin script and was officially adopted in the early 20th century during French rule of Vietnam. It uses digraphs and diacritics to mark tones and some phonemes. Vietnamese was historically written using chữ Nôm, a logographic script using Chinese characters to represent Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and some native Vietnamese words, together with many locally invented characters representing other words.

Classification

Early linguistic work in the late 19th and early 20th centuries classified Vietnamese as belonging to the Mon–Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic language family. In 1850, British lawyer James Richardson Logan detected striking similarities between the Korku language in Central India and Vietnamese. He suggested that Korku, Mon, and Vietnamese were part of what he termed "Mon–Annam languages" in a paper published in 1856. Later, in 1920, French-Polish linguist Jean Przyluski found that Mường is more closely related to Vietnamese than other Mon–Khmer languages, and a Viet–Muong subgrouping was established, also including Thavung, Chut, Cuoi, and others. The term "Vietic" was proposed by Hayes, who proposed to redefine Viet–Muong as referring to a subbranch of Vietic containing only Vietnamese and Mường. The term "Vietic" is used, among others, by Gérard Diffloth, with a slightly different proposal on subclassification, within which the term "Viet–Muong" refers to a lower subgrouping consisting of Vietnamese dialects, Mường dialects, and Nguồn.

History

Austroasiatic is believed to have dispersed around 2000 BC.
The arrival of the agricultural Phùng Nguyên culture in the Red River Delta at that time may correspond to the Vietic branch.
This ancestral Vietic was typologically very different from later Vietnamese.
As well as monosyllabic roots, it had sesquisyllabic roots consisting of a reduced syllable followed by a full syllable, and featured many consonant clusters.
Both of these features are found elsewhere in Austroasiatic and in modern conservative Vietic languages south of the Red River area.
The language was non-tonal, but featured glottal stop and voiceless fricative codas.
Borrowed vocabulary indicates early contact with speakers of Tai languages in the last millennium BC, which is consistent with genetic evidence from Dong Son culture sites.
Extensive contact with Chinese began during the Han dynasty.
At this time, Vietic groups began to expand south from the Red River Delta and into the adjacent uplands, possibly to escape Chinese encroachment.
The oldest layer of loans from Chinese into northern Vietic date from this period.
The northern Vietic varieties thus became part of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, in which languages from genetically unrelated families converged toward characteristics such as isolating morphology and similar syllable structure. Many languages in this area, including Viet–Muong, underwent a process of tonogenesis, in which distinctions formerly expressed by final consonants became phonemic tonal distinctions when those consonants disappeared. These characteristics have become part of many of the genetically unrelated languages of Southeast Asia; for example, Tsat, and Vietnamese each developed tones as a phonemic feature.
After the split from Muong around the end of the first millennium AD, the following stages of Vietnamese are commonly identified:
;Ancient Vietnamese
;Middle Vietnamese
;Modern Vietnamese
After expelling the Chinese at the beginning of the 10th century, the Ngô dynasty adopted Classical Chinese as the formal medium of government, scholarship and literature. With the dominance of Chinese came wholesale importation of Chinese vocabulary. The resulting Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary makes up about a third of the Vietnamese lexicon in all realms, and may account for as much as 60% of the vocabulary used in formal texts.
Vietic languages were confined to the northern third of modern Vietnam until the "southward advance" from the late 15th century.
The conquest of the ancient nation of Champa and the conquest of the Mekong Delta led to an expansion of the Vietnamese people and language, with distinctive local variations emerging.
After France invaded Vietnam in the late 19th century, French gradually replaced Literary Chinese as the official language in education and government. Vietnamese adopted many French terms, such as đầm, ga, sơ mi, and búp bê, resulting in a language that was Austroasiatic but with major Sino-influences and some minor French influences from the French colonial era.

Proto-Vietic

The following diagram shows the consonants of Proto-Vietic, along with the outcomes in the modern language:
The aspirated stops are infrequent and result from clusters of stops and *. The proto-phoneme * is also infrequent, and has reflexes only in Viet-Muong. However, it occurs in some important words and is cognate with Khmu. Ferlus 1992 also had additional phonemes * and *.
Proto-Vietic had monosyllables CV and sesquisyllables C-CV. The following initial clusters occurred, with outcomes indicated:
  • *pr, *br, *tr, *dr, *kr, *gr > > > s
  • *pl, *bl > MV bl > Northern gi, Southern tr
  • *kl, *gl > MV tl > tr
  • *ml > MV ml > mnh > nh
  • *kj > ''gi''

    Lenition of medial consonants

As noted above, Proto-Vietic had sesquisyllabic words with an initial minor syllable. When a minor syllable occurred, the main syllable's initial consonant was intervocalic and as a result suffered lenition, becoming a voiced fricative. These fricatives were not present in Proto-Viet–Muong, as indicated by their absence in Mường, but were present in Vietnamese until the 15th or 16th centuries. Subsequent loss of the minor-syllable prefixes phonemicized the fricatives. Ferlus 1992 proposes that originally there were both voiced and voiceless fricatives, corresponding to original voiced or voiceless stops, but Ferlus 2009 appears to have abandoned that hypothesis, suggesting that stops were softened and voiced at approximately the same time, according to the following pattern:
  • > > v. In Middle Vietnamese, the outcome of these sounds was written with a hooked b, representing a that was still distinct from v.
  • > > d
  • > > gi
  • > > g/gh
  • > > ''r''

    Origin of tones

Proto-Vietic did not have tones. Tones developed later in some of the daughter languages from distinctions in the initial and final consonants. Vietnamese tones developed as follows:
Glottal-ending syllables ended with a glottal stop, while fricative-ending syllables ended with or. Both types of syllables could co-occur with a resonant.
At some point, a tone split occurred, as in many other mainland Southeast Asian languages. Essentially, an allophonic distinction developed in the tones, whereby the tones in syllables with voiced initials were pronounced differently from those with voiceless initials. Subsequent to this, the plain-voiced stops became voiceless and the allotones became new phonemic tones.
The implosive stops were unaffected, and in fact developed tonally as if they were unvoiced.
These stops merged with the corresponding nasals before the Old Vietnamese period.
As noted above, consonants following minor syllables became voiced fricatives. The minor syllables were eventually lost, but not until the tone split had occurred. As a result, words in modern Vietnamese with voiced fricatives occur in all six tones, and the tonal register reflects the voicing of the minor-syllable prefix and not the voicing of the main-syllable stop in Proto-Vietic that produced the fricative. For similar reasons, words beginning with and occur in both registers.
A large number of words were borrowed from Middle Chinese, forming part of the Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary. These caused the original introduction of the retroflex sounds and into the language.

Old Vietnamese

Old Vietnamese separated from Muong around the 9th century. The sources for the reconstruction of Old Vietnamese are Nom texts, such as the 12th-century/1486 Buddhist scripture Phật thuyết Đại báo phụ mẫu ân trọng kinh, old inscriptions, and a late 13th-century Annan Jishi glossary by Chinese diplomat .
The Đại báo used Chinese characters phonetically where each word, monosyllabic in Modern Vietnamese, is written with two Chinese characters or in a composite character made of two different characters. This conveys the transformation of the Vietnamese lexicon from sesquisyllabic to fully monosyllabic under the pressure of Chinese linguistic influence, characterized by linguistic phenomena such as the reduction of minor syllables; loss of affixal morphology drifting towards analytical grammar; simplification of major syllable segments, and the change of suprasegment instruments. For example, the modern Vietnamese word trời 'heaven' was *plời in Old Vietnamese and blời in Middle Vietnamese.
Subsequent changes to initial consonants included:
  • re-introduction of implosive stops > and >
  • > >
  • >
  • a merger >