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A Basic Introduction to Vietnamese

This illustrated dictionary contains more than 1,500 frequently-used Vietnamese words and expressions which students need to know when learning to speak contemporary Vietnamese. This is equivalent to the number of vocabulary introduced in a beginning-level course in Vietnamese at universities and colleges in Vietnam as well as overseas.

This dictionary is organized into 38 themes, each of which presents 25–35 words and expressions, with 5–8 sentences demonstrating the usage of these words.

The Vietnamese language and its dialects

Vietnamese is the official language of Vietnam and is spoken by more than 90 million people in the country and about four million Vietnamese overseas. Vietnamese is a member of the Mon-Khmer subfamily in the Austroasiatic family of languages.

Vietnamese has several major dialects, which are the Northern, the North-Central, the South-Central and the Southern dialects. These dialects of Vietnamese are mutually intelligible. Speakers of a particular dialect have no trouble understanding the speakers of other dialects. The dialect of Hanoi, the capital city of the nation, is the standard form of the language and is used for media, education and official documents of the government.

The dialectal differences of Vietnamese chiefly concern the pronunciation and vocabulary. There is very little difference in grammatical construction. This dictionary introduces the Hanoi dialect. In some cases, however, it provides both the Hanoi and the Saigon vocabulary, since the Saigon dialect is spoken in the largest and economically most important city of the country, and many words and phrases of this dialect are broadly used in the other dialects as well. In such cases, the words of the two dialects are separated by a semi-colon (;)—with the Hanoi word given before and the Saigon word after the semi-colon (;).

For example, “spoon” in Vietnamese is presented as thìa; muỗng.

The Hanoi word is thìa and muỗng is the Saigon word.

The Vietnamese writing system

The Romanized writing system for Vietnamese was created by Portuguese Catholic missionaries with the assistance of Vietnamese followers in the early 17th century and has been the official writing system of Vietnam since the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to the letters found in English, it contains some letters and diacritic marks specific to Vietnamese:

Syllables and tones

A Vietnamese syllable consists of two mandatory components: a tone and a vowel. Three other components, an initial consonant, labialization (rounding of the lips when pronouncing a syllable) and a final consonant or semi-vowel, are all optional.

Vietnamese is a tonal language. Each syllable, which in most cases is the same as a word, carries a particular tone. A change in the tone creates a change in the meaning (see below).

Vowel markings

ă short vowel [a]¹

â less open short vowel [ə]²

ê less open vowel [e]²

ô less open vowel [o]² ơ unrounded vowel [ə]³ ư unrounded vowel [ɯ]³ đ the consonant [d]

Tone markings

` a low-falling tone

´ a high-rising tone

ˀ a low-falling-rising tone

˜ a high-rising broken tone

a low-falling broken tone

Examples

mà

má

mả

mã

mạ

¹ The mark “ ˘ ” is placed over a vowel to indicate a short vowel; that is, ă is shorter than a.

² The mark “ ˄ ” placed over a vowel refers to a vowel which is less open compared to the same vowel without this mark; that is, ô is less open than o.

³ The mark “ ˀ ” added to a vowel refers to a vowel which is unrounded compared to the vowel without this mark; that is, ư is unrounded, u is rounded.

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