Vietnamese (Vietnamese: tiếng Việt) is an Austroasiatic language that originated in Vietnam, where it is the national and official language. Vietnamese is spoken natively by over 70 million people, several times as many as the rest of the Austroasiatic family combined.[4] It is the native language of the Vietnamese (Kinh) people, as well as a second language or first language for other ethnic groups in Vietnam. As a result of emigration, Vietnamese speakers are also found in other parts of Southeast Asia, East Asia, North America, Europe, and Australia. Vietnamese has also been officially recognized as a minority language in the Czech Republic.
Like many other languages in Southeast Asia and East Asia, Vietnamese is an analytic language with phonemic tone. It has head-initial directionality, with subject–verb–object order and modifiers following the words they modify. It also uses noun classifiers. Its vocabulary has had significant influence from Chinese and French.
