Austroasiatic · ISO 639-3 vie · vi
Vietnamese Language Tiếng Việt
Vietnamese is an Austroasiatic language spoken by about 85 million people in 5 countries. It is an official language of Vietnam. It is written in the Latin and Han scripts.
Where Vietnamese is spoken
- Official language
- Regional official
- Spoken by 10%+
- 1–10%
- Smaller communities
About the Vietnamese language
Vietnamese (Tiếng Việt) is spoken by about 85 million people, which makes it the 19th most spoken language in the world — just behind Javanese (91 million) and ahead of Wu Chinese (84 million). It belongs to the Austroasiatic language family and, more precisely, to the Viet-Muong group within the Viet-Muong branch.
Where is Vietnamese spoken?
Vietnamese is used in 5 countries. The largest communities live in Vietnam (91 million), United States (1.2 million), Australia (357,381), Canada (248,286) and China (7,080). More than half of the population speaks it in Vietnam — the places where travellers will hear it everywhere.
Share of the population that speaks Vietnamese: Vietnam 86% (91 million), United States 0.3% (1.2 million), Australia 1.3% (357,381), Canada 0.6% (248,286) and China <0.1% (7,080).
Vietnamese is an official language in 1 country: Vietnam.
Writing system and status
Vietnamese is written in the Latin and Han scripts. It is a safe, widely transmitted language: children still learn it at home as their first language.
Its closest relatives in the same branch of the family are Muong.
ISO codes: ISO 639-1 vi, ISO 639-3 vie.
Frequently asked questions about Vietnamese
How many people speak Vietnamese?
Where is Vietnamese spoken?
In which countries is Vietnamese an official language?
What language family does Vietnamese belong to?
What is Vietnamese called in Vietnamese?
Is Vietnamese an endangered language?
Data: Languages of the World dataset (MIT) — ISO 639-3, Glottolog (CC BY 4.0), Unicode CLDR, Google LinguaMeta (CC BY 4.0) and Wikidata; country lists: samayo/country-json (MIT). Speaker numbers include first- and second-language speakers where sources report them.