Vietnamese is an Austroasiatic language originating from Vietnam where it is the national and official language. Vietnamese is spoken by over 70 million people, several times as many as the rest of the Austroasiatic family combined. It is the native language of the Vietnamese people, as well as a second language or first language for other ethnic groups in Vietnam. As a result of emigration, Vietnamese speakers are also found in other parts of Southeast Asia, East Asia, N. America, Europe, and Australia.

Like many other languages in Southeast Asia and East Asia, Vietnamese is an analytic language with
phonemic tone. It has head-initial directionality, with subject–verb–object order and modifiers following the words they modify. It also uses noun classifiers. Its vocabulary has had significant influence from Chinese and French.

Vietnamese was historically written using Chữ Nôm, a logographic script using Chinese characters (Chữ Hán) to represent Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and some native Vietnamese words, together with many locally invented characters to represent other words. French colonial rule of Vietnam led to the official adoption of the Vietnamese alphabet (Chữ Quốc ngữ) which is based on Latin script. It uses digraphs and diacritics to mark tones and some phonemes.