Culture of Vietnam
The Vietnamese culture has its beginnings in the Dong Son culture about 3000 years ago. She was very similar to other Southeast Asian cultures.
Today's culture of Vietnam is a mixture of the following three elements:
- Original local cultures of the Vietnamese and other peoples of the land
- Chinese elements, which came through Sinicisation into the country when Vietnam was under Chinese rule or only formally independent Chinese vassal state. These elements were temporarily pushed back deliberately.
- Elements of the Central European cultural circle, which were taken in the time French colonial rule
Language and writing
The Vietnamese language is spoken by almost all the inhabitants of the country. It belongs in all probability to the Mon-Khmer language family and is now grouped together with that of the Muong to the Viet - Muong languages. During the Chinese domination and under the Vietnamese feudal lords was Chinese the official language. From the 13th century, the Vietnamese became so written with Nom characters Chinese writing. From this period the many loanwords from Chinese, which make up about 30 percent of the modern Vietnamese come.
From the 17th century the Latin alphabet was introduced in the Vietnamese language by French missionaries. The Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes (1591-1660) developed a transcription system of the Vietnamese, which became the basis of the used in the written language from the late 19th century, Quoc Ngu called alphabet. To illustrate the six tones of the Vietnamese, the Latin alphabet numerous diacritics have been added to it.
In addition to the Vietnamese language languages of various other language families are spoken by the more than 50 ethnic groups of the country yet. In addition to the Chinese, they are: Mon-Khmer (Khmer, Mon and 19 other ethnic groups ) and Austronesian ( Cham, Giarai, Ede and others), Thai - Kadai languages ( Thai ), Tibeto - Burmese and Hmong - Mien languages ( Hmong, Dao ).