Vietnamese Script
Vietnamese (tiếng Việt) is the national, official language of Vietnam. It is the native language of Vietnamese people (Kinh), and of about three million Vietnamese residing elsewhere. It also is spoken as a first or second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam.
It is part of the Austroasiatic language family of which it has, by far, the most speakers (several times that of the other Austroasiatic languages combined). Much of Vietnamese vocabulary has been borrowed from Chinese, and it formerly used a modified set of Chinese characters called chữ nôm given vernacular pronunciation. As a byproduct of French colonial rule, Vietnamese was influenced by the French language; the Vietnamese alphabet (quốc ngữ) in use today is a Latin alphabet with additional diacritics for tones, and certain letters.
Read more about Vietnamese Script: Geographic Distribution, Linguistic Classification, Language Policy, Lexicon, Language Variation
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“Follow me if I advance
Kill me if I retreat
Avenge me if I die.”
—Mary Matalin, U.S. Republican political advisor, author, and James Carville b. 1946, U.S. Democratic political advisor, author. All’s Fair: Love, War, and Running for President, epigraph (from a Vietnamese battle cry)
“If it’s a good script I’ll do it. And if it’s a bad script, and they pay me enough, I’ll do it.”
—George Burns (b. 1896)