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.
Facts
Liturgical role (class)Vernacular used liturgically 1 Connections
Attested in Region
Spoken throughout Vietnam, where it is the official language.
Source Vietnamese language (Wikipedia)
Language Of
Entity-backed identity for the language enum value this record already carries, resolved to the live divinity language entity that value names, per the phase 3 entity-backed browse bucket conversion (docs\design_entity_backed_browse_buckets_20260928.md, owner decisions 2026-09-28, w-bucketconv-divlang2-0929, mapping corrected). The language fact itself, with its own citation, stays on the record unchanged; this relationship only adds the durable entity identity the value already names.
Entity-backed identity for the language enum value this record already carries, resolved to the live divinity language entity that value names, per the phase 3 entity-backed browse bucket conversion (docs\design_entity_backed_browse_buckets_20260928.md, owner decisions 2026-09-28, w-bucketconv-divlang2-0929, mapping corrected). The language fact itself, with its own citation, stays on the record unchanged; this relationship only adds the durable entity identity the value already names.
Liturgical Language Of
Entity-backed identity for the language enum value this record already carries, resolved to the live divinity language entity that value names, per the phase 3 entity-backed browse bucket conversion (docs\design_entity_backed_browse_buckets_20260928.md, owner decisions 2026-09-28, w-bucketconv-divlang2-0929, mapping corrected). The language fact itself, with its own citation, stays on the record unchanged; this relationship only adds the durable entity identity the value already names.
Uses This Script
Written today in a Latin-based alphabet known as chu Quoc ngu.
Source Vietnamese language (Wikipedia)
Sources
1. Vietnamese language (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationVietnamese language, lead paragraph
is an Austroasiatic language primarily spoken throughout Vietnam where it is the official language
Vietnamese language, Catholic prayer, liturgical role
Vietnamese Catholics practice a distinctive style of prayer recitation called đọc kinh, in which each tone is assigned a specific note or sequence of notes.
Uses This Script: Roman, Vietnamese language, writing
Vietnamese currently is written using a Latin-based alphabet known as chữ Quốc ngữ.
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