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Vietnamese (ti?ng Vi?t, or less commonly Vi?t ng?[1]), formerly known under French colonization as Annamese (see Annam), is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of the Vietnamese people (ngu?i Vi?t or ngu?i Kinh), who constitute 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese, most of whom live in the United States. It is also spoken as a second language by some ethnic minorities of Vietnam. It is part of the Austroasiatic language family, of which it has the most speakers by a significant margin (several times larger than the other Austroasiatic languages put together). Much vocabulary has been borrowed from Chinese, especially words that denote abstract ideas in the same way European languages borrow from Latin and Greek, and it was formerly written using the Chinese writing system, albeit in a modified format and was given vernacular pronunciation. The Vietnamese writing system in use today is an adapted version of the Latin alphabet, with additional diacritics for tones and certain letters. As the national language of the majority ethnic group, Vietnamese is spoken throughout Vietnam by the Vietnamese people, as well as by ethnic minorities. It is also spoken in overseas Vietnamese communities, most notably in the United States, where it has more than one million speakers and is the seventh most-spoken language (it is 3rd in Texas, 4th in Arkansas and Louisiana, and 5th in California[2]). In Australia, it is the sixth most-spoken language. According to the Ethnologue, Vietnamese is also spoken by substantial numbers of people in Australia, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Canada, China, Côte d'Ivoire, Cuba, Czech Republic, Finland, France, French Guiana, Germany, Laos, Martinique, the Netherlands, New Caledonia, Norway, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Denmark, Sweden, Senegal, Thailand, the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, South Korea, Vanuatu and Taiwan. Vietnamese was identified more than 150 years ago[3] to be part of the Mon-Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic language family (a family that also includes Khmer, spoken in Cambodia, as well as various tribal and regional languages, such as the Munda languages spoken in eastern India, and others in southern China). Later, Mu?ng was found to be more closely related to Vietnamese than other Mon-Khmer languages, and a Vi?t-Mu?ng sub-grouping was established. As data on more Mon-Khmer languages was acquired, other minority languages (such as Thavung, Ch?t languages, Hung, etc.) were found to share Vi?t-Mu?ng characteristics, and the Vi?t-Mu?ng term was renamed to Vietic. The older term Vi?t-Mu?ng now refers to a lower sub-grouping (within an eastern Vietic branch) consisting of Vietnamese dialects, Mu?ng dialects, and Ngu?n (of Qu?ng Bình Province).[4]
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