Sino-Vietnamese Vocabulary

Sino-Vietnamese Vocabulary

Sino-Vietnamese are the elements in the Vietnamese language derived from Chinese. They account for between 30% and 60% of the Vietnamese vocabulary, not including calques from China. This vocabulary was originally written with Chinese characters that were used in the Vietnamese writing system, but like all written Vietnamese, is now written with Vietnamese alphabet, the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet that was adopted in the early 20th century for writing the Vietnamese language.

The term Sino-Vietnamese was used by Samuel Martin in one of the three main strands of his "Sino-Xenic" (1953) nomenclature for Chinese as spoken and written in Vietnam (Sino-Vietnamese), Korea (Sino-Korean), and Japan (Sino-Japanese).