Vietnamese words for every day: days, months, numbers and greetings

How Vietnamese words are written

• tiếng ViệtVietnamese language Latin
• chữ Quốc ngữnational script Latin
• xin chàohello Latin

Vietnamese is written in chữ Quốc ngữ, a Latin alphabet of 29 letters. Seven of them carry a diacritic that changes the letter itself: ă, â, ê, ô, ơ, ư and đ. Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, Francisco de Pina among them, developed the script in the early 17th century, and Alexandre de Rhodes printed it in his Vietnamese–Portuguese–Latin dictionary of 1651. The Vietnamese alphabet is listed letter by letter on the alphabets page.

On top of the letters sit the tone marks. Vietnamese has six tones in the Hanoi standard, and five of them are written: ngang, the level tone, has no mark (ba, three); huyền takes a grave accent (bà, grandmother); sắc an acute (bá); hỏi a small hook (bả); ngã a tilde (bã); and nặng a dot below the vowel (bạ). A vowel can carry a letter diacritic and a tone mark at once, as in the ế of tiếng.

Every syllable is written as a separate word, so a two-part word such as tháng giêng or chủ nhật has a space in the middle. Before Quốc ngữ, Vietnamese was written in Chinese characters and the local chữ Nôm; some words on these pages still show their Chinese form in the tables, such as 主日 for chủ nhật.

Dates, numbers and greetings: what to expect

Days and months are counted. Monday is thứ hai, the second, and Sunday the only named day, chủ nhật; January is tháng một, month one. The days of the week in Vietnamese explain why the count starts at two, and the months in Vietnamese add the two lunar names, tháng giêng and tháng chạp, along with the day-month-year order of a date.

Numbers are regular, apart from four sound changes. Ten is mười alone and mươi after twenty, one becomes mốt and five lăm in the units place, and four is often tư. The numbers in Vietnamese page covers these, plus linh and lẻ for an inner zero, nghìn or ngàn for a thousand, and the comma that marks decimals.

Greetings depend on age. Chào is both hello and goodbye, and it takes a kinship word for the person greeted: anh, chị, em, bác, ông, bà. The greetings in Vietnamese page explains when xin chào is the right form and when it sounds stiff, and why thank you has two spellings, cảm ơn and cám ơn.

Where Vietnamese is spoken

Vietnamese is the national language of Vietnam, where its name is tiếng Việt. The country's provinces and cities are listed in Vietnamese with their full diacritics. The northern speech of Hanoi and the southern speech of Ho Chi Minh City, still often called Saigon, differ most audibly in the tones: the south merges hỏi and ngã into one dipping tone. The tables on these pages give the Hanoi pronunciation and note the southern one where a dictionary records it.

Many Vietnamese words come from Chinese through the Sino-Vietnamese layer of the vocabulary, visible in tư, nhất and triệu. The Asian word list sets 243 basic Vietnamese words beside Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Khmer and other languages of the region.