Language
Vietnamese is the official language of the country. It is a language pertaining to the Austroasiatic language family, a language family also including Khmer, Mon, etc. Vietnamese was spoken by 65.8 million people in Vietnam at the 1999 census. In the early 21st century, around another three million Vietnamese speakers are found outside of Vietnam. Thus Vietnamese is the most spoken language of the Austroasiatic family, being spoken by three times more people than the second most spoken language of the family, Khmer. Both languages, however, are extremely different: under the influence of Chinese, Vietnamese has become a tonal language, while Khmer has remained non-tonal. Vietnamese was heavily influenced by Chinese and a great part of the Vietnamese vocabulary is Chinese, while Khmer was heavily influenced by Sanskrit and Pali and a great part of its vocabulary is now made up of Indian words, so that both languages look very dissimilar on the surface. Since the early 20th century, the Vietnamese have used a Romanized script introduced by the French. (See Vietnamese language and Vietnamese alphabet).
Read more about this topic: Demographics Of Vietnam
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“The reader uses his eyes as well as or instead of his ears and is in every way encouraged to take a more abstract view of the language he sees. The written or printed sentence lends itself to structural analysis as the spoken does not because the reader’s eye can play back and forth over the words, giving him time to divide the sentence into visually appreciated parts and to reflect on the grammatical function.”
—J. David Bolter (b. 1951)