Vietnamese phonology

This article is a technical description of the sound system of the Vietnamese language, including phonetics and phonology.

But this cluster tends to be retained by many young urban people in southern Vietnam, especially in Ho Chi Minh City and surrounding areas.

In the other, /w/ is deleted while the consonant remains:[2] However, they are becoming distinct and pronounced as [kw] or [w], [hw], [ʔw], [ɣw], and [ŋw] respectively, especially in formal speech or when reading a text.

Arguments for the second analysis include the limited distribution of final [c] and [ɲ], the gap in the distribution of [k] and [ŋ] which do not occur after [i] and [e], the pronunciation of ⟨ach⟩ and ⟨anh⟩ as [ɛc] and [ɛɲ] in certain conservative central dialects,[20] and the patterning of [k]~[c] and [ŋ]~[ɲ] in certain reduplicated words.

However, they are always pronounced /k, ŋ/ after the other vowels /u, uː, o, ɔ, iː, ɨː, ɨ, aw, a, aː, ɛ, ə, əː/.

[20] The other closed dialects (Huế, Quảng Nam, Bình Định) which have also been merged in codas, but some vowels are pronounced differently in some dialects: The ông, ôc rimes are merged into ong, oc as [ăwŋ͡m], [ăwk͡p̚] in many Southern speakers, but not with ôn, ôt as pronounced [oːŋ͡m], [oːk͡p̚].

The ôông, ôôc (oong, ooc, eng, ec, êng, êc as well) rimes are the "archaic" form before becoming ông, ôc by diphthongization and still exist in the North Central dialect in many placenames.

The articulation of these rimes in the North Central dialect are [oːŋ], [oːk̚] without a simultaneous bilabial closure or labialization.

[26] With the above phonemic analyses, the following is a table of rimes ending in /n, t, ŋ, k, ŋ͡m, k͡p/ in the Ho Chi Minh City dialect: Vietnamese vowels are all pronounced with an inherent tone.

Vietnamese often uses instead a register complex (which is a combination of phonation type, pitch, length, vowel quality, etc.).

According to Hannas (1997), there are 4,500 to 4,800 possible spoken syllables (depending on dialect), and the standard national orthography (Quốc Ngữ) can represent 6,200 syllables (Quốc Ngữ orthography represents more phonemic distinctions than are made by any one dialect).

[35] A description of syllable structure and exploration of its patterning according to the Prosodic Analysis approach of J.R. Firth is given in Henderson (1966).

C2: The optional coda C2 is restricted to labial, coronal, and velar stops and nasals /p, t, k, m, n, ŋ/, which cannot cooccur with the offglides /j, w/.

T: Syllables are spoken with an inherent tone contour: ^ Notes: Below is a table comparing four linguists' different transcriptions of Vietnamese vowels as well as the orthographic representation.

Han (1966) uses acoustic analysis, including spectrograms and formant measuring and plotting, to describe the vowels.

Her formant plots also seem to show that /ɜː/ may be slightly higher than /ɜ/ in some contexts (but this would be secondary to the main difference of length).

Another thing to mention about Han's studies is that she uses a rather small number of participants and, additionally, although her participants are native speakers of the Hanoi variety, they all have lived outside of Hanoi for a significant period of their lives (e.g. in France or Ho Chi Minh City).