Tiếng Việt · Vietnamese

Six tones written straight onto the vowel, a spelling that hides nothing, and not a single ending to learn.

Austroasiatic (Vietic) · compare with Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese

🎚️ What Vietnamese does with pitch, stress and rhythm — the layer that isn't spelled.

Sound snapshot

Every Vietnamese syllable is written as a separate word and has the shape (consonant) (w) vowel (consonant) + TONE, and the spelling records all of it — the tone included, as a mark on the vowel: ma, mà, má, mả, mã, mạ are six words. Two families of diacritic sit on the vowels and they are not the same thing. â ê ô ơ ư ă make a different vowel (ê is /e/, e is /ɛ/; ô is /o/, o is /ɔ/; ơ is an unrounded o, ư an unrounded u; â and ă are short ơ and short a). The five tone marks (` ´ ̉ ~ .) sit on top of those. The consonants have a few missionary spellings to learn once: đ (with the bar) is /ɗ/, an implosive d, and plain d is /z/ in Hanoi; b is implosive too; ch is /c/, a palatal stop, not English ch; th is an aspirated t, never English th; kh is the German ach sound; ng can START a syllable (ngon); gi is /z/; c, k and q are all /k/, chosen by the vowel that follows. Syllables end open or in one of eight sounds — m n ng nh, the clipped unreleased stops p t c ch, or the glides written -i/-y and -o/-u — and length is contrastive on a and ơ: tai 'ear' has a long a, tay 'hand' a short one. Hanoi merges ch/tr, s/x and d/gi/r; the south keeps all three apart and merges two tones instead. If you speak Korean you already own the three hardest consonant facts — aspirated th against plain t is your ㅌ against ㄸ, the unreleased final -p -t -c are your 받침 ㅂ ㄷ ㄱ exactly, and ư is ㅡ — which leaves the tones, the implosives, and an ng- at the start of a word.

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