'Person-calling pronoun', or Vietnamese: Đại từ xưng hô) can serve as a noun phrase.
In polite speech, the aspect of kinship terminology is used when referring to oneself, the audience, or a third party.
[2] True pronouns are categorized into two classes depending on if they can be preceded by the plural marker chúng, bọn, or các.
Like other Asian pronominal systems, Vietnamese pronouns indicate the social status between speakers and others in the conversation in addition to grammatical person and number.
The label "familiar" indicates that the speaker and another person are in a closer relationship such as between family members or between close friends.
There are parallel self-deprecating first-person pronominalizations of words for "servant" in other languages, such as 奴 (nù) in Eastern Min and 僕 (boku) in Japanese.
The first person ta is often used when talking to oneself as in a soliloquy, but also indicates a higher status of the speaker (such as that of a high official, etc.).
The absolute pronoun người ta has a wider range of reference as "they, people in general, (generic) one, we, someone".
Distant cousins with "grandparent status" that are younger than the speaker may be referred to as ông/bà trẻ ("young grandpa/ma").
This phenomenon is highlighted in a Vietnamese proverb: Bé bằng củ khoai, cứ vai mà gọi (Small as a potato, but call by rank).
In practice, age differences are commonplace, and some people may be hesitant to take advantage of their superior cousin status.
When addressing a stranger, the speaker may have to consider whether this person is a bit or a lot older or younger than themself or their parents.
For rather young people in their early twenties, the non-kinship term bạn ("friend") is also a recognized usage.
Tớ, also meaning "servant", is also popular among young people to refer to themselves with close friends (used in conjunction with cậu for "lad").
With the abolition of the monarchy in 1945, some pronouns, such as the royal trẫm and others related to royalty and Confucianism, have fallen out of use and are no longer applicable and use in contemporary Vietnamese and are mostly encountered in historical texts, literature, and formal writings.