Chu+? Quo^'c Ngu+?, the Vietnamese language, written under the romanized form, is the one used today by more than sixty million inhabitants. There are, of course, other ethnic groups, such as the Montagnards, the Chinese , the Indians, the Cambodians, who also have to communicate in this language, which has been popularized since the seventeenth century by the Western missionaries. After the fall of the Nationalist Vietnamese government , there are additionally more than a million Vietnamese expatriates in Europe, in America, in Australia and Japan who have continued their efforts to preserve this language and taught their children their mother tongue, either as a first or as a second native language. The present Communist Vietnamese government has also made conscious efforts to replace words of Sino-vietnamese origin by chu+? Quo^'c Ngu+? to "make the language clearer and more adaptable": However this endeavor has not always been received with unanimous support from all the Vietnamese.
The Vietnamese language actually belongs to the Mon-Khmer stock, the two languages spoken by the Burmese (Mon) and the Cambodians (Khmer). It originally comes from the linguistic branch of the large Austro-Asiatic family . However, due to the large influence of the Chinese, most documents were either written in Chinese characters ( chu Han) or in demotic characters of Sino-Vietnamese( cf Nguye^?n Di`nh Hoa` 1959 ) there was therefore a mistaken belief that Vietnamese was of Chinese origin when in fact it is not. There is still nowadays, the erroneous popular belief that the literary Vietnamese takes the Sino-Vietnamese characters; whereas the popular Vietnamese has its origins in the Chu+? Quo^'c Ngu+? .
Vietnamese, despite its relatively young written form, is centuries old in its spoken form. Despite several anomalies in the syntax, it was proven impossible to correct them because it has evolved too far and ingrained in the hearts and minds of its people.
The language is monosyllabic and tonal It has five diacritical marks described as
Sa('c Rising
Hue^`n Falling
Hoi? Falling then rising
Nga.~ High rising, broken
Na(.ng. Low falling, short
Thus if one takes the word La (=to scream) No diacritical mark, level
and one adds Sa('c La' (=a leaf)
Hue^`n La` (=to be)
Nga.~ La~ (=to detach, to faint)
Na(.ng La. (=strange)
From one word, by varying the diacritical marks, one can have six new words with six different meanings. However, it should not be construed that any word can be created by simply adding the different diacritical marks to the word. One of my students once asked me if he could simply take any words and put on the different diacritical marks to make up new words. Sometimes, when this works, it is indeed the best system to acquire Vietnamese new vocabulary, but it does not always work out this way. One suggestion would be to simply try to learn the spoken Vietnamese first, prior to dealing with its written form !
