How You Refer to Yourself and Others

For Vietnamese people, one thing that you will realize early on is that family is a very important part of Vietnamese culture. This directly affects the way that people interact with each other and how they view themselves. This section is a mixture of the grammar of how we talk about people and the vocabulary you use for family members. Like the other grammatical sections, many of the concepts learned here will be picked up as you go so DON’T MEMORIZE EVERYTHING HERE. Just learn the basics of how the concept works and move on to the simpler sections. You can come back later when you start seeing these words. This section is way more complicated than the others because the topic is complicated. The following sections will be way easier. SKIM THIS SECTION because as important as this topic is to the language, it will be way more efficient to learn kind of how it works and move on then learning every single intricacy. Disclaimer over.

In English, we have fairly simple ways of referring to ourselves and other people. If we’re talking about ourselves, we would use the word “I”, if we’re talking about someone directly to them, we would use “you”, so on and so forth. But when talking to people in Vietnamese, your relationship to them plays a heavy role in your word choice. When referring to themselves and others, Vietnamese people will use their age and gender in relation to the person they are talking to in order to figure out the correct words to use. While there does exist a word that translates to the English “I” known as tôi, it isn’t used nearly as often as in English since people will normally use their title, also known as a kinship term, outside of formal situations.

A good example of this is that many younger generations of Vietnamese people living outside of Việt Nam like to use the word con_ _to refer to themselves. This is because the word con_ _means “child” in Vietnamese and is used to refer to yourself when talking to someone older than you by a generation. This is so popular, that many times, the younger generations will use this word even with people their age. This is because normally, they only talk to older people using Vietnamese so it becomes ingrained into their speech and becomes a bit of a bad habit.

Another thing about Vietnamese that is important to figuring out how to talk about people is their familial relation to you. In public when talking to people, knowing their age and gender is enough information, but if they’re in your family, it’s a bit different. Like in English, you will talk about them using their title. For instance, if you’re talking about your “Dad”, one of the ways you can refer to him is ba, which just translates back to dad in English. But there are two differences from English that you will see. First, not only will you refer to him as ba, he will also refer to himself as ba in place of “I”. Second, instead of using tôi, the direct translation for “I”,_ _to refer to yourself, you would both call and be referred to as con_ _because that is what you are in relationship to your dad. Simple enough right? Not quite. As you’ll see in a few moments, there are a lot of Vietnamese family titles. Maybe too many. But luckily for you, your family will naturally refer to themselves using their titles assuming you are Vietnamese. So knowing the normal cases will be enough to scrape by and get you started.

One last way you can use to refer to yourself and others is just by using your names. That means you just replace the words “you” and “I” with your names. But this only applies when you’re talking with friends and other people who you’re close with. So don’t use this in any formal scenarios.

Now that we have a good idea on how these work, here is a list of the general singular personal pronouns used to refer to yourself and others

Personal Pronouns (Đại Từ) - Singular
Word	Direct Translation	Usage Notes
Tôi	I/Me	Used in Formal Occasions, May be seen as cold in casual settings
Mình	I/Me/Myself	Used for more casual and/or intimate settings
Anh Ấy	He/Him	Typically used when talking about someone generically
Cô Ấy	She/Her	Typically used when talking about someone generically
Nó	It (He/She)	Normally used for just it, but can be used to refer to another person in a causal and somewhat impolite way

Notice how there is no word corresponding to “you”, in this list. That’s because you would simply either use the person’s title or their name in that case.

Next, we have the general plural personal pronouns.

Personal Pronouns (Đại Từ) - Plural
Word	Direct Translation	Usage Notes
Chúng + Your Title	We/Us (General)	To get the word we in Vietnamese, all we need to do is combine the word chúng with the title we use to refer to ourselves, i.e. chúng con.
Chúng Tôi	We/Us (Exclusive)	Formal, special case of above. The word “we”, but excluding the person being talked to.
Chúng Ta	We/Us (Inclusive)	Like above, but including the person being talked to. Also can mean, “you guys” in causal Northern dialects
Mình	We/Us/Ourselves	Same usage as mình above, but plural.
Người Ta	They/Them	Typically used in more casual scenarios
Họ	They/Them	Typically used in more formal scenarios

Next, are titles/kinship terms used with friends and the general public. These will be the way you use to refer to yourself and others around you outside of your family in most situations.

Titles
Word	Direct Translation	Usage Notes
Anh	Older Brother	Used for a man that is older than you, but is in the same generation. Also used to refer to your husband
Chị	Older Sister	Used for a woman that is older than you, but is in the same generation.
Em	Younger Sibling	Used for a person that is younger than you, but is in the same generation. Also used to refer to your wife.
Chú	Dad’s Younger Brother	Used for a man that is a little younger than your parents.
Cô	Dad’s Younger Sister	Used for a woman that is a little younger than your parents.
Bác	Parent’s Older Sibling	Used for a person that is a little older than your parents.
Ông	Grandpa	Used for an old man
Bà	Grandma	Used for an old lady
Con	Child	Used for anybody younger by at least a generation. Typically in the South.
Cháu	Niece/Nephew	Used for anybody younger by at least a generation. Typically in the North.

Finally, here is a list with the titles of you and your family members to use.

Family - Gia Đình
	Father	Mother	Older Brother	Older Sister	Younger Sibling	Children
North (Bắc)	Bố	Mẹ	Anh	Chị	Em	Con
South (Nam)	Ba	Má

Extended Family
Vietnamese	English	Usage Notes
Anh Họ / Em Họ	Cousin	When talking to cousins, they use the same pronouns as siblings
Cháu	Grandchildren/ Niece/Nephew	Unlike the English words, there is no distinction between different uses of cháu
Ông Cố / Bà Cố	Great-Grandparents	None
Words based on Parental Side
Mom’s Side		Dad’s Side
Ông Ngoại	Grandpa	Ông Nội
Bà Ngoại	Grandma	Bà Nội
Dì	Mom’s Younger Sister
Cậu	Mom’s Younger Brother
	Dad’s Younger Brother	Chú
	Dad’s Younger Sister	Cô
Bác	Parent’s Older Sibling	Bác
	Mom’s Brother’s Wife
Mợ	Cậu’s Wife
	Chú’s Wife	Thím

With that, we now have a decently comprehensive list of what to call yourself and others. It may seem a bit complicated at first, but really, once you understand how it works, the rest will come naturally. Just know that a lot of the more complicated titles will likely just be told to you by a native speaker if they use them. Again, no need to learn all of these all at once. Even natives can have trouble juggling all of these titles.