Regional Differences

In addition to all the things listed above, Vietnamese also has a number of regional dialects which fall neatly into 3 main categories: Northern (Bắc), Southern (Nam), and Central (Trung). Each of these corresponds to a major city in Vietnam, being Ha Nội, Sài Gòn, and Huế respectively. There are also a number of sub-dialects that exist in between all of these categories, but their differences aren’t as major.

The most widely used dialect, and the “official” dialect used by Vietnam is the Northern dialect. This dialect is used in most forms of Vietnamese media including movies, songs, and other sources of entertainment. This dialect is also known for being the most strict of the dialects when it comes to pronunciation. Because of all these reasons, this dialect is often the one recommended to be used for learning purposes. When it comes to pronunciation, this dialect has the characteristic of pronouncing the consonants “d”. “gi”, and “r” with a z sound.

The next most widely used dialect in Vietnam is the Southern dialect. This is the most common dialect used by Vietnamese people living outside of Vietnam. Chances are, if you happen to be reading this dialect, it’s more than likely that you, or the Vietnamese people around you, will be using this dialect to communicate. However, the Southern dialect is known for being fairly loose in terms of pronunciation in comparison to the Northern dialect, even with the Northern dialect having many instances of loose pronunciation. If you are a native Vietnamese speaker with a Southern accent, this can also make it much harder to spell words because of how much sounds can blend together. But with a lot of patience and spelling mistakes, you will be able to spell things right sometimes. The random spelling mistakes will add to the native authenticity. Once you start seeing more words in writing though, things will get way easier to distinguish and it will be easier to catch what things were pronounced more loosely and how to convert them approximately into spelling. When it comes to pronunciation, the major characteristics of the Southern accent include pronouncing the consonants “d”. “gi”, “r”, and “v” with a consonant y sound and also converting hard “k” sounds like “kh” and “qu” into something similar to a “hw” sound.

Finally, we have our last dialect, the Central Vietnamese dialect. This dialect is based on the dialect of old Vietnamese royalty which traditionally lived in the Center of the country. Because of this, the Central dialect is in a bit of a different position in comparison to either the Northern or Southern dialect. While the Northern and Southern dialect normally just differ in pronunciation and a few words here and there, the Central dialect can almost feel like it has its own set of vocabulary because of how many different words there are in this dialect that only appear here. This difference is so pronounced, that oftentimes, even native speakers of Vietnamese from the North and South can have trouble speaking and sometimes even understanding the Central dialect. For the purposes of this document, I will mainly be covering the Northern and Southern dialects because I am more familiar with them, but I will do my best to make sure that the Central dialect also has a chance to make appearances.