Vietnamese is an Asian language spoken by around 70 million people. It’s a language spoken in Vietnam as well as in the Cambodian and Vietnamese diaspora all over the world, for example in USA. The Vietnamese minority is quite big in Poland, that is why translations from and into Vietnamese are quite common.
Vietnamese belongs to Austroasiatic languages group as well as, for example, Khmer (Cambodian). It has many vocabulary and grammar similarities to Mandarin Chinese and to French as far as vocabulary borrowings go. The impact of Chinese into Vietnamese is due to geographical closeness and the borrowings from French came during the French Indochina period. Surprisingly, the modern language of Vietnam has a significant amount of vocabulary borrowings from Japanese.
In the past, Vietnamese used two alphabets to write the language – Chinese characters as well as Nôm writing. Vietnamese Nôm was a writing system using Chinese characters to represent Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and some native Vietnamese words. In the case of new words, new characters were created based on the Chinese script; it was used till the end of XIXth century and is not used any more.
The interesting fact is modern Vietnamese, contrary to for example the Japanese language, does not use Chinese characters any more. In the late 19th century, the ‘national language script’ developed by European missionaries started to expand. This Latin script – used in today’s Vietnam – contains 29 letters of the alphabet. The language uses many diacritics such as, for example, à, á, ả, ã, ă, â/ê/ô, ơ, ư. Some of them are to mark Vietnamese letters and some of them to mark tones. Chinese characters are nowadays used only by Vietnamese calligraphers.
Vietnamese, the same as Chinese or Thai, uses tones. The same syllable pronounced with different tones has a different meaning. The tones are marked with diacritical marks. There are 5 tones and 1 neutral one (no tone), so 6 tones in total, with examples below:
tone 2 – à
tone 3 – ả
tone 4 – ã
tone 5 – á
tone 6 – ạ
The language of Vietnam has grammar similar to the other South East Asia languages, the same as the Chinese language – it has no plural form of nouns, no genders and no tenses.
Nowadays, as the economy of Vietnam is booming, many companies are looking for translation and localization services of their products into Vietnamese. Due to the Vietnamese diaspora in Poland, many clients need sworn translations.
Last, but not least, Vietnam is an interesting holiday destination; it’s currently one of the fastest growing tourist destinations in the world. The top attractions are beautiful sunny beaches, the Old Quarter in Hanoi, Halong Bay with its limestone islands, the mesmerising caves in Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng, and the tombs and citadel in Hue city. The other reason to visit Vietnam is its delicious local food and doing shopping from merchandisers selling their products from boats in the delta of the Mekong River. Don’t forget to prepare a short translation of the most common phrases in Vietnamese to be used during the holidays to communicate with local people!
(translation M.K.)
