bảng chữ cái tiếng Việt
The Vietnamese alphabet has 29 letters: 12 vowels and 17 consonants. It adds ă, â, đ, ê, ô, ơ and ư to the Latin alphabet, drops f, j, w and z, and marks the six tones with accents on the vowels.
Tap a letter to hear it; the small ▶ plays the example word. Practice mode hides names and sounds until you tap a card.
Letter names and sounds follow the standard Hanoi pronunciation; major Southern differences are noted.
These pairs and the triple ngh each spell one sound. They are not separate letters of the alphabet.
Every syllable has one of six tones, marked on its main vowel. The same syllable with a different tone is a different word.
| Tone | Mark | Example | Meaning | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ngang (level) | a | ma | ghost | |
| huyền (falling) | à | mà | but | |
| sắc (rising) | á | má | cheek; mother (South) | |
| hỏi (dipping) | ả | mả | grave, tomb | |
| ngã (broken rising) | ã | mã | horse (Sino-Vietnamese); code | |
| nặng (heavy) | ạ | mạ | rice seedling |
Vietnamese is a tonal language: ma, mà, má, mả, mã and mạ are six different words. The tone mark is part of the spelling and cannot be left out. The level tone (ngang) has no mark.
A vowel can carry both a letter mark and a tone mark: ê + sắc gives ế, ư + nặng gives ự. Only the first mark makes a new letter of the alphabet; the tone marks do not, so ế is still the letter ê.
Vietnamese words are made of one-syllable parts, and each syllable is written separately: Việt Nam, bánh mì (bread), y tá (nurse).
Pronunciation here is that of Hanoi. In Saigon and the South, d and gi sound like y in “yes”, r is an r, s often sounds like sh, tr is different from ch, and v is often like y. The hỏi and ngã tones also merge in the South.
These letters are not part of the alphabet and appear only in foreign words and names. The f sound is written ph (phở), and the z sound of Hanoi is written d, gi or r.
The k sound is written k before e, ê, i and y (kem), q in qu, and c everywhere else (cá). In the same way g becomes gh and ng becomes ngh before e, ê and i: ghế (chair), nghề (trade).
Đ đ, with a bar, is the d sound of English “dog”. Plain d is a different sound, like z in Hanoi and y in the South: đá (stone) vs. da (skin).
Audio is synthetic speech generated with Google Cloud Text-to-Speech (Chirp 3: HD voices). Letter inventory checked against Unicode CLDR.