Overview
Vietnamese is often erroneously considered to be a "monosyllabic" language. Vietnamese words may consist of one or more syllables. There is a tendency for words to have two syllables (disyllabic) with perhaps 80% of the lexicon being disyllabic. Some words have three or four syllables — many polysyllabic words are formed by reduplicative derivation.
Additionally, a Vietnamese word may consist of a single morpheme or more than one morpheme. Polymorphemic words are either compound words or words consisting of stems plus affixes or reduplicants.
Most Vietnamese morphemes consist of only one syllable. Polysyllabic morphemes tend to be borrowings from other languages. Examples follow:
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Vietnamese word English gloss Phonological form Morphological form cơm "cooked rice" monosyllabic monomorphemic cù lao "island" disyllabic monomorphemic dưa chuột "cucumber" disyllabic bimorphemic vội vội vàng vàng "hurry-scurry" polysyllabic polymorphemic (reduplicative)
Most words are created by either compounding or reduplicative derivation. Affixation is a relatively minor derivational process.
Older styles of Vietnamese writing wrote polysyllabic words with hyphens separating the syllables, as in cào-cào "grasshopper", sinh-vật-học "biology", or cà-phê "coffee". Spelling reform proposals have suggested writing these words without spaces (for example, the above would be càocào, sinhvậthọc, càphê). However, the prevailing practice (although considered careless to some) is to omit hyphens and write all polysyllabic words with a space between each syllable.
Read more about this topic: Vietnamese Morphology