Vietnamese
(tiếng Việt, or less commonly
Việt ngữ), formerly known
under the French colonization as
Annamite (see
Annam)
is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue
of the Vietnamese people (
người Việt or
người Kinh),
who constitute between 88% and 90% of Vietnam's population and of about
three million overseas Vietnamese, including more than a million individuals
of Vietnamese heritage 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
(three to four times the number of speakers of Khmer, the second most
spoken Austroasiatic language). However, it contains much vocabulary borrowed
from Chinese and was originally written using the Chinese writing system.
The predominant Vietnamese writing system in use today is an adapted version
of the Latin alphabet, though the
Chu Nom system, based on Chinese
characters, was also formerly employed.
