Austroasiatic is believed to have dispersed around 2000 BC. The arrival of the agricultural
Phùng Nguyên culture in the
Red River Delta at that time may correspond to the Vietic branch. This ancestral Vietic was typologically very different from later Vietnamese. As well as monosyllabic roots, it had
sesquisyllabic roots consisting of a reduced syllable followed by a full syllable, and featured many consonant clusters. Both of these features are found elsewhere in Austroasiatic and in modern conservative Vietic languages south of the Red River area. The language was non-tonal, but featured glottal stop and voiceless fricative codas. Borrowed vocabulary indicates early contact with speakers of
Tai languages in the last millennium BC, which is consistent with genetic evidence from
Dong Son culture sites. Extensive contact with
Chinese began during the
Han dynasty (2nd century BC). At this time, Vietic groups began to expand south from the Red River Delta and into the adjacent uplands, possibly to escape Chinese encroachment. The oldest layer of loans from Chinese into northern Vietic (which would become the Viet–Muong subbranch) date from this period. The northern Vietic varieties thus became part of the
Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, in which languages from genetically unrelated families converged toward characteristics such as
isolating morphology and similar syllable structure. Many languages in this area, including Viet–Muong, underwent a process of
tonogenesis, in which distinctions formerly expressed by final consonants became phonemic
tonal distinctions when those consonants disappeared. These characteristics have become part of many of the genetically unrelated languages of Southeast Asia; for example,
Tsat (a member of the
Malayo-Polynesian group within
Austronesian), and Vietnamese each developed tones as a phonemic feature. . Ferlus 1992 also had additional
phonemes * and *. Proto-Vietic had monosyllables CV(C) and sesquisyllables C-CV(C). The following initial clusters occurred, with outcomes indicated: • *pr, *br, *tr, *dr, *kr, *gr > > >
s • *pl, *bl > MV
bl > Northern
gi, Southern
tr • *kl, *gl > MV
tl >
tr • *ml > MV
ml >
mnh >
nh • *kj >
gi Lenition of medial consonants As noted above, Proto-Vietic had
sesquisyllabic words with an initial
minor syllable (in addition to, and independent of, initial clusters in the main syllable). When a minor syllable occurred, the main syllable's initial consonant was intervocalic and as a result suffered
lenition, becoming a voiced fricative. These fricatives were not present in Proto-Viet–Muong, as indicated by their absence in
Mường, but were present in Vietnamese until the 15th or 16th centuries. Subsequent loss of the minor-syllable prefixes phonemicized the fricatives. Ferlus 1992 proposes that originally there were both voiced and voiceless fricatives, corresponding to original voiced or voiceless stops, but Ferlus 2009 appears to have abandoned that hypothesis, suggesting that stops were softened and voiced at approximately the same time, according to the following pattern: • > >
v. In
Middle Vietnamese, the outcome of these sounds was written with a hooked
b (ꞗ), representing a that was still distinct from
v (then pronounced ). • > >
d • > >
gi • > >
g/gh • > >
r Origin of tones Proto-Vietic did not have tones. Tones developed later in some of the daughter languages from distinctions in the initial and final consonants. Vietnamese tones developed as follows: : Glottal-ending syllables ended with a glottal stop , while fricative-ending syllables ended with or . Both types of syllables could co-occur with a resonant (e.g. or ). At some point, a
tone split occurred, as in many other
mainland Southeast Asian languages. Essentially, an
allophonic distinction developed in the tones, whereby the tones in syllables with voiced initials were pronounced differently from those with voiceless initials. (Approximately speaking, the voiced
allotones were pronounced with additional
breathy voice or
creaky voice and with lowered pitch. The quality difference predominates in today's northern varieties, e.g. in
Hanoi, while in the southern varieties the pitch difference predominates, as in
Ho Chi Minh City.) Subsequent to this, the plain-voiced stops became voiceless and the allotones became new phonemic tones. The implosive stops (, and ) were unaffected, and in fact developed tonally as if they were unvoiced. (This behavior is common to all East Asian languages with implosive stops.) These stops merged with the corresponding nasals (, and ) before the Old Vietnamese period. As noted above, consonants following minor syllables became voiced fricatives. The minor syllables were eventually lost, but not until the tone split had occurred. As a result, words in modern Vietnamese with voiced fricatives occur in all six tones, and the tonal register reflects the voicing of the minor-syllable prefix and not the voicing of the main-syllable stop in Proto-Vietic that produced the fricative. For similar reasons, words beginning with and occur in both registers. (Thompson 1976 reconstructed voiceless resonants to account for outcomes where resonants occur with a first-register tone, but this is no longer considered necessary, at least by Ferlus.) A large number of words were borrowed from
Middle Chinese, forming part of the
Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary. These caused the original introduction of the retroflex sounds and (modern
s,
tr) into the language.
Old Vietnamese Old (or Ancient) Vietnamese separated from Muong around the 9th century. The sources for the reconstruction of Old Vietnamese are
Nom texts, such as the 12th-century/1486 Buddhist scripture
Phật thuyết Đại báo phụ mẫu ân trọng kinh ("Sūtra explained by the Buddha on the Great Repayment of the Heavy Debt to Parents"), old inscriptions, and a late 13th-century (possibly 1293)
Annan Jishi glossary by Chinese diplomat (c. 1259 – 1309). : The used Chinese characters phonetically where each word, monosyllabic in Modern Vietnamese, is written with two Chinese characters or in a composite character made of two different characters. This conveys the transformation of the Vietnamese lexicon from sesquisyllabic to fully
monosyllabic under the pressure of Chinese linguistic influence, characterized by linguistic phenomena such as the reduction of minor syllables; loss of affixal morphology drifting towards analytical grammar; simplification of major syllable segments, and the change of suprasegment instruments. For example, the modern Vietnamese word 'heaven' was
*plời in Old Vietnamese and
blời in Middle Vietnamese. Subsequent changes to initial consonants included: • re-introduction of implosive stops > and > • > > • > • a merger >
Middle Vietnamese The writing system used for Vietnamese is based closely on the system developed by
Alexandre de Rhodes for his 1651
Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum. It reflects the pronunciation of the Vietnamese of Hanoi at that time, a stage commonly termed
Middle Vietnamese (). The pronunciation of the "rime" of the syllable, i.e. all parts other than the initial consonant (optional glide, vowel nucleus, tone and final consonant), appears nearly identical between Middle Vietnamese and modern Hanoi pronunciation. On the other hand, the Middle Vietnamese pronunciation of the initial consonant differs greatly from all modern dialects, and in fact is significantly closer to the modern Saigon dialect than the modern Hanoi dialect. section in
Alexandre de Rhodes's (
Vietnamese–Portuguese–Latin dictionary) The following diagram shows the orthography and pronunciation of Middle Vietnamese: : occurs only at the end of a syllable. This letter, , is no longer used. does not occur at the beginning of a syllable, but can occur at the end of a syllable, where it is notated
i or
y (with the difference between the two often indicating differences in the quality or length of the preceding vowel), and after and , where it is notated
ĕ. This
ĕ, and the it notated, have disappeared from the modern language. Note that
b and
p never contrast in any position, suggesting that they are allophones. The language also has three clusters at the beginning of syllables, which have since disappeared: •
tl > modern
tr - tlước > trước (written in chữ Nôm as 𫏾 (⿰車畧) where 車 represented the initial tl- sound). •
bl > modern
gi (Northern),
tr (Southern) - blăng > trăng/giăng (written in chữ Nôm as 𪩮 (⿱巴夌) where 巴 represented the initial bl- sound). •
ml >
mnh > modern
nh (Northern), l (Southern) - mlời > lời/nhời (written in chữ Nôm as 𠅜 (⿱亠例) where 亠 (simplified from 麻; 𫜗 [⿱麻例]) represented the initial ml- sound). s,
acutes and
apices. Most of the unusual correspondences between spelling and modern pronunciation are explained by Middle Vietnamese. Note in particular: • de Rhodes' system has two different b letters, and . The latter apparently represented a
voiced bilabial fricative . Within a century or so, both and had merged as , spelled as
v. • de Rhodes' system has a second medial glide that is written
ĕ and appears in some words with initial
d and hooked
b. These later disappear. •
đ was (and still is)
alveolar, whereas
d was dental. The choice of symbols was based on the dental rather than alveolar nature of and its
allophone in Spanish and other Romance languages. The inconsistency with the symbols assigned to vs. was based on the lack of any such place distinction between the two, with the result that the
stop consonant appeared more "normal" than the fricative . In both cases, the
implosive nature of the stops does not appear to have had any role in the choice of symbol. •
x was the
alveolo-palatal fricative rather than the
dental of the modern language. In 17th-century
Portuguese, the common language of the Jesuits,
s was the
apico-alveolar sibilant (as still in much of Spain and some parts of Portugal), while
x was a
palatoalveolar . The similarity of apicoalveolar to the Vietnamese
retroflex led to the assignment of
s and
x as above. De Rhodes's orthography also made use of an
apex diacritic on '
and ' to indicate a final
labial-velar nasal , an allophone of that is peculiar to the Hanoi dialect to the present day. An example is , which later became . This diacritic is often mistaken for a tilde in modern reproductions of early Vietnamese writing.
Modern era During
French Indochina, a large number of new vocabulary items were introduced into Vietnamese, including ones from Japanese
wasei-kango for Western-originated concepts, adopted through Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation. Following the defeat of South Vietnam in 1975 by North Vietnam in the
Vietnam War, the Vietnamese language within Vietnam has gradually shifted towards the Northern dialect.
Hanoi, the largest city in Northern Vietnam was made the capital of Vietnam in 1976. A study stated that "The gap in vocabulary use between speakers in North and South Vietnam is now much narrower than before. There is little to distinguish between how the generations that were born and grew up in the South after 1975 now speak, compared to their peers in the North. This gap is almost non-existent in newspapers, on radio and television, and in websites." In contrast, during and following the Vietnam War, thousands of Northern Vietnamese moved to the Czech Republic due to Hanoi's partnership with the now obsolete
Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. As a result, today, the Vietnamese language is generally taught through the Northern dialect in the Czech Republic in contrast with the Southern dialect in the United States. == Geographic distribution ==