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Almost every nation has its own language that speaks of its culture and heritage,
so does Vietnam. 'Vietnamese' is the official language of Vietnam. Having a similarity
with Cambodia's official language 'Khmer', Vietnamese is a bit difficult language
especially for the foreigners. Other than Vietnamese, Chinese, Khmer, Cham and
other tribal languages are also spoken in Vietnam.
Each syllable of Vietnamese can be spoken in six different tones, which makes
it confusing and difficult sometimes. Much of the vocabulary of Vietnamese has
been borrowed from Chinese. For writing Vietnamese, Roman alphabets and accent
marks are used to represent tones. So in a way we can say, vocal Vietnamese
is difficult than the written one.
Spoken by about 68 million people in Vietnam, Vietnamese is an Austroasiatic
language. Apart from Vietnam, Vietnamese is also spoken in countries like Australia,
Cambodia, Finland, France, Laos, Germany, Netherlands, Senegal, UK, USA, China,
Canada, Norway and Philippines.
Originally Vietnamese was written with a Siniform script, which was essentially
Chinese in structure, but later Vietnamese literature developed a more Vietnamese
style. Kim Van Kieu, the 'Tale of Kieu', a romantic novel written by Nguyen
Du is one of the greatest literary work in Vietnamese. It was in the 17th century,
when the Roman Catholic missionaries introduced a system of writing Vietnamese
in the Latin alphabets.
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