Vietnamese · Tiếng Việt

About Vietnamese

Language family

Austroasiatic, Vietic branch

Where it's spoken

Vietnam

Speakers

roughly 85–95 million speakers

Vietnamese's closest relative is Muong, spoken by a smaller ethnic minority in northern Vietnam; more distantly it belongs to the same Austroasiatic family as Khmer. Centuries of Chinese rule left a heavy layer of borrowed vocabulary, once written with Chinese-derived Chữ Nôm characters. French colonial administrators later promoted the Latin-based Chữ Quốc Ngữ alphabet with its distinctive tone-marking diacritics, which is now the sole standard writing system.