Phonology Deep Dive | Vietnamese pronunciation, tones, and tone marks

I'm not going to lie: Vietnamese phonology is pretty complex. Learning to hear and distinguish Vietnamese's tones will require you to learn about some new concepts, think about how you speak English, and listen carefully.

Having said that, you can learn the tones.

This article walks through each tone in Vietnamese and everything you need to make sense of it. We've also gathered dozens of audio recordings from real Vietnamese speakers so that you can literally hear what we're talking about.

This article isn't short—it'll be a 15–20 minute read—but by the time you're done, you'll know what you're doing and where to go from here.

Let's get into it:

Is Vietnamese a tonal language? 

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but yes: Vietnamese is a tonal language.

In fact, you might call it a very tonal language.

Whereas Mandarin has 4 tones (plus a neutral one), Vietnamese has 6 tones:

(Yes, each of those audio recordings had a different tone. If you couldn't tell how, you're in the right place 💪)

Here they are visualized in this same order:

(More precisely, Vietnamese is what's called a "register language" because its tones are defined not only by pitch contour/melody but also voice quality and length.)

That's a lot of big words, but hang on a second before you start panicking.

I've got some good news.

The #1 thing you need to understand to make sense of Vietnamese tones

English makes heavy use of tones, too.

Don't believe me?

Well, check this out. I'm going to say the word dude eight times, and it's going to mean something different every time.

Here we go:

Cool, huh?

I'm not much of a voice actor, but there's some cool things we can point out:

And now we need to get technical for a second:

Tones vs intonation

English has tones, and Vietnamese has tones, but they're not quite the same sort of tones:

What this means is that a rising tone (dude #8) is a sure signal that we're voicing a question or communicating our uncertainty/anxiety in English, but this isn't necessarily the case in Vietnamese. In Vietnamese, some syllables just rise by nature, whether they're part of a question or not.

If this is hard to wrap your mind around—say the word articulation out loud for a second. Now find the beat. Notice what you said? arTIcuLAtion. some syllables are stressed—you pronounce them louder, more clearly, and hold them for slightly longer—and some syllables are unstressed. In articulate, the stressed syllables are TI and LA. Importantly, this isn't anything to do with TI or LA themselves—these same syllables are unstressed in words like PAtty and GElatin.

Tones work similarly in Vietnamese.

Each syllable can have a different "melody"—it might have a pitch that's high and flat, a pitch that initially dips before rising up high, or one of a handful of other shapes. Tones work differently in Vietnamese than they do in English, and that'll take getting used to... but, for now, just remember:

The five components of every tone in Vietnamese

In the section after this one, we're going to walk through all of Vietnamese's tones, step by step. To prepare for that, there are five things about tones in Vietnamese that I think you should pay attention to as a learner:

These aren't necessarily The Things™ a textbook or journal article will use to categorize tones by... but, as a learner, each one does give you a nice little handhold to latch onto.

1. The syllable, as every tone occupies a syllable 

Your journey to getting comfortable with Vietnamese tones starts with identifying Vietnamese syllables. Thankfully, this is very easy. Spaces are placed before and after each syllable in Vietnamese.

For example, there are three syllables in the phrase "in Vietnam":

What's a bit tricky is that these spaces are also inserted between syllables that form words, such as between "Việt" and "Nam". You'll get used to this before long, but you might initially struggle to determine whether a particular syllable stands by itself or is part of a word.

2. Dấu, or tone mark, which tells you the tone of a syllable

The Vietnamese word "dấu"

means mark/sign/symbol. (Yes, in Vietnamese, "d" makes a Z sound.) There are five dấu, plus an dấu-less dấu, and each one serves to indicate the tone (ngang ) of a word.

You may see these two terms used seemingly interchangeably online, but, strictly speaking, dấu refers to the written symbol that appears above/below a vowel, while ngang refers to the sound/pitch pattern of a tone.

Here are the Vietnamese tone markers:

† Note: Each of the tone names is just a normal Vietnamese word, and different people may translate them slightly differently. For example, you'll sometimes see ngang hỏi translated as "asking tone", and other times a "question tone".

3. Starting point, or the relative highness/lowness of a tone's pitch

Bear with me for a moment, but I'm going to state something very obvious:

And this is super important to understand.

For example, consider that we have two people: a young girl with a naturally higher-pitched voice and an old man with a naturally lower-pitched voice. Chances are, the young girl's thanh nặng (mid falling tone) will be pronounced at a higher pitch than the old man's thanh sắc (mid / high-rising tone).

Another important implication of the fact that everybody's voice is unique is that not everybody will make these tones in exactly the same way. Take a moment to skim these charts (both taken from Nguyễn & Edmondson (1998)) for me:

Vietnamese's six tones, as uttered by a male from northern Vietnam:

Vietnamese's six tones, as uttered by a female from Hanoi (in northern Vietnam):

The shape of the tones is more or less the same, but there's also a fair bit of variance!

4. Phonation type, or the type of voice you use

This section was originally very complex, but I've decided to simplify it. Go ahead and check out the article Wikipedia if you want a bit more complexity, or Edmondson (2006) for a much more anatomically-heavy look. (It's cool, if you're a nerd.)

Having said that, there are two main things you need to understand about speech:

For example, from more constricted to more lax airflow:

The audio recordings likely sound a bit weird because people don't normally talk "purely" in one of these other voices. We use our modal/normal voice, and then we sprinkle in bits of creakiness or breathiness for effect. It might help to think of these voice qualities as being knobs you dial up or dial down:

(If you ctrl + f for "#5 is a dude of pure exasperation", that recording features a transition from modal to tense voice)

5. Checked tones, or whether a tone ends in a consonant or vowel

Eventually, you'll need to build mastery over the tones, recognize them when you hear them, and become able to reproduce each one confidently.

For now, though, here's a quick hack for you:

And now let's get a crash course into each of Vietnamese's 6 tones—and, more importantly, hear a bunch of audio samples for each one.

A step-by-step guide to all six tones (+ audio)

As we said in the beginning of the article, Vietnamese has six tones. We're now ready to talk about them—but before you start thinking too hard about this, take a second and listen to your ears.

In particular, I want to do three things:

I've summarized the following notes from the common points of where Brunelle, 2009; Pham, 2003; Phạm & McCleod, 2019; and Wikipedia overlap. Also featured are wonderfully clear audio recordings from Tung Hoang of Open Lib, via CC BY-NC 4.0.

Ngang, the "flat" tone

Ngang is your baseline: it's what every other tone you make in Vietnamese is set against. Thankfully, it's also the easiest tone to make.

Before we get started, close your eyes and listen to several syllables with this tone:

Some pointers:

Now listen to these audio samples while thinking about the above details:

Huyền, the "deep" tone

Huyền is very similar to Ngang, but it is lower in pitch. With only that in mind, listen carefully to Hoang's audio recordings and see what your ears pick up on:

Some tips:

Now listen to these audio samples with the above pointers in mind:

Sắc, the "sharp" tone

Sắc is one of Vietnamese's rising tones. Again, before we say more, listen to Hoang's audio and see what you observe:

Some pointers:

Now that you've got an image of this tone, try listening to it again:

† Note: If you don't know what this means, go skim #4 of the "five components" section above.

Nặng, the "heavy" tone

Nặng is a low tone, and it is also a very short tone. With this in mind, go ahead and listen to Hoang's audio:

Some pointers:

And now to the audio:

Hỏi, the "asking" tone

This is perhaps Vietnamese's most complex tone. Before thinking about it logically, take a few listens to Hoang's recording and see what stands out to you:

Some pointers:

And now for the examples:

Ngã, the "tumbling" tone

Ngã is similar to sắc, but with a distinct difference that'll pop out at you. Listen to Hoang's audio and see if you can pick it out:

Some pointers:

Nga without break in its middle would be like sắc, a rising tone.

Some quick notes about Southern Vietnamese vs Northern Vietnamese

This is going to be very brief, but on the off-chance you're learning Southern Vietnamese, here are a few things you should keep in mind.

For an in-depth contrast of Vietnam's four main dialects, see:

Hỏi and ngã have merged

Hỏi and ngã, the final two tones discussed above, are Vietnamese's two "dipping" tones. In Southern Vietnam, they have merged.Notice how, in the bottom-right chart, the purple and brown line are almost completely superimposed.

Pitch contour (the shape of your tone) is more important than phonation type (the type of voice you use)

If you're learning Southern Vietnamese, you can ignore all of the above notes about modal/creaky/breathy voice. While tones and voice quality matter in Northern Vietnamese, tones in Southern Vietnamese are differentiated purely by their pitch contour (their "melody").

Vietnamese vowels and consonant clusters

This is beyond the scope of this article—for in-depth information, see Phạm, B. & McLeod, S. (2016), linked above.

From a very high-level perspective:

This isn't a complete list of all the changes; it's just the things that I felt could be summarized in a bullet point.

A big table of tone pairs

Tones do not occur in isolation in Vietnamese: they always occur next to other tones. This is important for two reasons:

As you progress from left to right in this table, the tone of the second syllable will change; as you progress from top to bottom, the tone of the first syllable will change.

How am I ever going to learn all of this?

First: Yes, you can learn how to pronounce Vietnamese's tones. It'll eventually be second nature and won't require thought or conscious effort on your part at all.

On the way there, though, you'll pass through several stages:

In fact, this same basic pipeline can be applied to learning pretty much any aspect of Vietnamese—or, indeed, learning anything about anything. It's a process!

Migaku facilitates this process by making text interactive—you can simply click on words you don't know to see definitions of what they mean. This makes it possible to make sense of Vietnamese media even if you aren't that good at Vietnamese yet.

To get more out of the time you spend in Vietnamese, you can click that orange button in the top-right corner of the dictionary to make flashcards out of useful-looking words. We'll nudge you to review it periodically (this is called spaced repetition) and, gradually, these words will work their way into your long-term memory.

When you eventually begin interacting with native Vietnamese speakers, every conversation will give you immediate feedback. You'll either find that you spoke clearly enough to be understood—in which case, great!—or you'll gradually identify trouble syllables that you need to pay a bit more attention to.

For now: immerse, enjoy, and improve!

Phonology, articulation, or whatever this has been...

...Phew.

That was a lot. Even for me.

If you're feeling a bit overwhelmed right now—that's OK. This takes time, and it'll come with its fair share of challenges.

For now, just remember one thing:

Now, go take a break.

Bookmark this page, come back to skim through the explanations from time to time, and try to see if the audio recordings have become any clearer to you.

Good luck!