Did You Know?
Vietnamese is used by more than 68 million people around the world.
Overview:
Vietnamese (tiếng Việt, tiếng Việt Nam, or Việt ngữ), a tonal language, is the national and official language of Vietnam (Việt Nam). It is the mother tongue of the Vietnamese people (người Việt or người kinh), who constitute about 87% of Vietnam's population and of about two million Vietnamese emigrants, including a significant number of Vietnamese Americans. It is also spoken as a second language by Vietnam's minority population. Although it contains many vocabulary borrowings from Chinese and was originally written using Chinese characters, it is considered by linguists to be one of the Austroasiatic languages, of which it has the most speakers (it has 10 times the number of speakers as the next most-spoken language, the Khmer language). Vietnamese currently uses the Latin alphabet (with many additions) for writing.
Classification:
Vietnamese is part of the Viet-Muong grouping of the Mon-Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic language family, a family that also includes Khmer, spoken in Cambodia, as well as various tribal and regional languages, such as the Munda languages, spoken in northeastern India, and others in southern China.
More broadly, as part of the Austroasiatic language family, Vietnamese is also considered part of the Austric superfamily (which also includes the Austronesian languages such as Malay, Cham, Malagasy, Maori and Hawai'ian), although the Austric superfamily grouping itself is disputed
Geographic Distribution:
According to the Ethnologue, Vietnamese is also spoken in Australia, Cambodia, Canada, China, Côte d'Ivoire, Finland, France, Germany, Laos, Martinique, Netherlands, New Caledonia, Norway, Philippines, Senegal, Thailand, United Kingdom, USA, and Vanuatu.
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Did You Know? statistics come from Ethnologue, "Languages of the world, and a whole lot more!"
Overview, Classification and Geographic Distribution information comes directly from Wikipedia, "The free encyclopedia"
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