Vietnamese translations for your company

The Vietnamese language is the official language of Vietnam. It is spoken there by approximately 66 million people, and it has about 68 million speakers worldwide. The question of whether it originates from the Austroasiatic or the Sino-Tibetan language group has long been disputed; more recent research classifies it most closely to the Mon-Khmer languages and thus to the Austroasiatic language family.

Vietnamese is a so-called isolating language: Vietnamese words are not inflected. It is also monosyllabic – that is, each syllable has its own meaning and new words are created by combining individual syllables. Phonetically identical syllables are additionally distinguished by six syllable tones and thus each have a different meaning: The Vietnamese language – like Thai and Chinese – is consequently a “tonal language.” There is a northern, a central and a southern dialect. The uniform national language has evolved from the northern dialect, which is centered around the capital Hanoi.

Vietnamese is strongly influenced by Chinese: Until the beginning of the 20th century, both languages were used equally in Vietnam – Chinese, however, was predominantly used as a written and administrative language. The previously used Chinese characters were replaced by a Latin alphabet in 1910, which uses special characters to reproduce the sounds in the written script. In addition to numerous Chinese loanwords, modern Vietnamese also contains English and – as a result of the colonial period – a large number of French loanwords.