Consonants, vowels and tones across Vietnamese dialects

Abstract

Purpose: Vietnamese is spoken by over 89 million people in Vietnam and it is one of the most commonly spoken languages other than English in the US, Canada and Australia. This study defines between one and nine different dialects of Vietnamese spoken in Vietnam. In Vietnamese schools, children learn Standard Vietnamese which is based on the northern dialect; however, if they live in other regions they may speak a different dialect at home.

Method: This paper describes the differences between the consonants, semivowels, vowels, diphthongs and tones for four dialects: Standard, northern, central and southern Vietnamese.

Result: The number and type of initial consonants differs per dialect (i.e. Standard = 23, northern = 20, central = 23, southern = 21). For example, the letter “r” is pronounced in the Standard and central dialects as the retroflex /ʐ/, northern dialect as the voiced alveolar fricative /z/ or the trilled /r/ and in the southern dialect as the voiced velar fricative /ɣ/. Additionally, the letter “v” is pronounced in the Standard, northern and central dialects as the voiced bilabial fricative /v/, the southern dialect as the voiced palatal approximant /j/ and in the lower northern dialect (Ninh Binh) as the voiceless bilabial fricative /f/. Similarly, the number of final consonants differs per dialect (i.e. Standard = 6, northern = 10, central = 10, southern = 8). Finally, the number and type of tones differs per dialect (i.e. Standard = 6, northern = 6, central = 5, southern = 5).

Conclusion: Understanding differences between Vietnamese dialects is important so that speech-language pathologists and educators provide appropriate services to people who speak Vietnamese.

Keywords:

• Vietnamese
• dialect
• speech
• assessment
• analysis
• consonants
• vowels
• semivowels
• tones

Supplementary material available online Appendix A and Appendix B