Grammar
Vietnamese, like many languages in Southeast Asia and Chinese, is an analytic (or isolating) language. As such its grammar highly relies on word order and sentence structure rather than morphology (in which word changes through inflection). Whereas European languages tend to use morphology to express tense, Vietnamese uses grammatical particles or syntactic constructions.
Vietnamese is often erroneously considered to be a "monosyllabic" language. It is true that Vietnamese has many words that consist of only one syllable; however, most words are indeed disyllabic. This is largely because of the many reduplication words that appear in household vocabulary, or adjectives. More accurately, most free morphemes are monosyllabic.
Vietnamese syntax conforms to the Subject Verb Object word order.
Vocabulary
* Note: mention the two layers of Chinese borrowings at different time periods
* mention other languages (with examples)
As a result of a thousand years of Chinese domination, much of Vietnamese vocabulary relating to science and politics are derived from Chinese. As much as 60% of the vocabulary have Chinese roots, although many compound words are Sino-Vietnamese, composed of native Vietnamese words combined with the Chinese borrowings. Reduplication is a regular part of the language that usually denotes intensity. One can usually distinguish between a native Vietnamese word and a Chinese borrowing if it can be reduplicated or its meaning doesn't change when the tone is shifted. As a result of French colonization, Vietnamese also has words borrowed from the French language. Recently many words are borrowed from English, for example TV (pronounced tivi), phông for font. Sometimes these borrowings are calques literally translated into Vietnamese (phần mềm for software, lit. soft part).
*Focus on Vocabulary???
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