Vietnamese

How to spell vietnamese

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce vietnamese

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does vietnamese mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to Vietnam, its people, its culture, or its language.
2. nounThe language spoken in Vietnam, or the people of Vietnam.

Vietnamese in a sentence

• adjective

  The new vietnamese restaurant on the corner serves excellent noodle soup.

• noun

  He is learning vietnamese so he can talk with his wife's family.

• adjective

  She studied vietnamese history during her year abroad.

• noun

  The menu was printed in both English and vietnamese.

Where does vietnamese come from?

Language of origin: Other

This word is built from the place name Vietnam combined with the suffix -ese, which English uses to form nationality words and language names. The country name itself comes from the Vietnamese Việt Nam, in which Nam means 'south' and Việt is the name of the principal ethnic group, so the whole expression can be understood as something like 'the Viet of the south'. The suffix -ese traces back through Old French to the Latin -ensis, an ending meaning 'originating in' or 'belonging to a place', the same element that gives us Chinese, Portuguese, and Japanese. English adopted the form Vietnamese during the colonial and wartime nineteenth and twentieth centuries as Western contact with the region grew. The spelling trap lies in the quiet vowel cluster 'ie' after the V and in remembering the single 'n' before the doubled stress at the end, since the word is easy to mangle when written quickly.

How the word is built

• Vietnam (the country name)
• -ese (suffix forming demonyms and language names)