Vietnamese (Vietnamese: tiếng Việt ) is an Austroasiatic language spoken
primarily in Vietnam where it is the national and official language.
Vietnamese is spoken natively by around 85 million people, several times as
many as the rest of the Austroasiatic family combined. It is the native
language of the Vietnamese (Kinh) people, as well as a second or first
language for other ethnic groups in Vietnam. It is split into three main
dialects, Northern (Hanoi), Central (Hue), and Southern (Ho Chi Minh City).
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.