Vietnamese Language

Vietnamese is an Austroasiatic language of the Vietic subgroup, spoken primarily throughout Vietnam, where it is the official language, natively by around 86 million people and as a second language by a further 11 million. It is an isolating, tonal language whose morphemes are predominantly monosyllabic, and a significant part of its lexicon, called Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary, was borrowed from Middle Chinese. It is currently written in a Latin-based alphabet known as chu Quoc ngu, which relies largely on seventeenth-century Portuguese orthography and was officially adopted in the early twentieth century, and it was historically written in chu Nom, a script that combines Chinese characters with locally created ones. In this atlas the entry names the language of Vietnamese scriptural and devotional texts.