Introduction

Vietnamese is the third most widely spoken language Asian language in the USA, spoken at home by an estimated 1,207,004 people in 2007, or about 2.2 percent of all of those who spoke a non-English language. Only Chinese, with 4.5 percent of non-English speakers, and Tagalog, with 2.7 percent of non-English speakers, were used by more Americans. As shown in Table 1.1, by 2007 Vietnamese ranked fifth among all the nation's non-English languages and it was one of the fastest growing. Vietnamese use has increased dramatically over the years. Spoken by only around 3,000 Vietnamese people in the USA in 1970 (Rumbaut 2007), by 1980 the number of speakers over the age of 5 who reported speaking Vietnamese at home had grown to close to 200,000, according to data from the US Census. By the time of the 1990 Census, this number had increased to 507,069 and then to 1,009,627 in 2000 and 1,207,004 in 2007.

History

From about 100 BCE until the tenth century CE, Vietnam was under Chinese rule. Throughout the Chinese period, classical Chinese, known in Vietnamese as Chũ-nho (pronounced roughly “chew nyahw”), was used for writing. From about the time of independence until as recently as the early twentieth century, the Vietnamese wrote their language in an adapted version of Chinese characters, known as Chũ-nôm (pronounced roughly “chew nohm”).