Vietnamese Translations

POZENA’s professional Vietnamese translations

• Vietnamese is a member of the Austroasiatic language family. In the early stages of its development (in the first millennium AD, when the Vietnamese territory was under Chinese rule), the language was considerably influenced by Chinese. Vietnamese emerged as a distinct language in the 9th century. However, for many centuries, it was Chinese that served as the language of administration and education. With the onset of the colonial period, French was introduced in official settings.
• For about a thousand years, written Vietnamese was rendered by modified Chinese characters. In the 17th century, a romanized script was devised by Catholic missionaries. However, it was not until the early 20th century that the Latin alphabet became the predominant writing system.
• Modern Vietnamese is divided into three major dialect groups: North (Hanoi), Central (Hue) and South (Saigon). These dialects are mutually intelligible and differ primarily in pronunciation (minor differences occur at the level of lexis).

• Being an isolating language, Vietnamese is lacking in such grammatical categories as: tenses, persons, genders or cases. The proper meaning of utterances is determined by context or special words.
• Vietnamese employs reduplications (syllable repetitions), which sometimes alter the word meaning.
• The Vietnamese alphabet contains two letters that are unique to Vietnamese: Ơ, ơ and Ư ư. The alphabet contains ten digraphs and one trigraph (Ngh).
• Like many other Asian languages, Vietnamese is a tonal language. Each syllable has a tone which distinguishes words. Overall, there are six tones (including the neutral one), which in writing are indicated with diacritics.
• The most common Vietnamese family name is Nguyễn (38% of Vietnamese people have this name). Nguyễn was the name of the dynasty that ruled Vietnam from 1802 to 1945.