Vietnamese is the national and official language spoken by about 87% of Vietnam's population and two million expatriate Vietnamese in North America, Europe, Australia, Japan and elsewhere. Vietnam is a very young country with more than half of the population born after 1975.

FACTS ABOUT VIETNAMESE LANGUAGE:
- A language spoken by about 80,000,000 people
-A tonal language with six different tones
-Considered by linguists to be one of the Austro-Asiatic languages
-The current writing system uses Latin alphabet with diacritic marks
-There are three mutually intelligible dialects: Ha Noi or Northern dialect, Hue or Central dialect, and Sai Gon or Southern dialect.

The most important festival of the year is Tet, a week-long event in late January or early February that heralds the new lunar year and the advent of spring. Celebration consists of both raucous festivity (fireworks, drums, gongs) and quiet meditation. In addition to Tet, there are about twenty other traditional and religious festivals each year.