Dieu language

The Dieu language is an Austroasiatic language within the Vietic branch of Austroasiatic languages. It is the official language in Daidieu, and a common language in Vietnam.

It is the second most spoken Austroasiatic language with almost 39 million native speakers, its vocabulary has major influence from. It is one of the native language of the Vietnamese (Kinh) people, as well as a second language or first language for other ethnic groups in Vietnam and Daidieu. Like many other languages in Southeast Asia and East Asia, Dieu is an analytic language with phonemic tone. It has head-initial directionality, with subject–verb–object order and modifiers following the words they modify. Unlike Vietnamese, it does not have classifiers.

Dieu is written using Chữ Nôm, a logographic script using Chinese characters to represent Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and some native Vietnamese words, together with many locally-invented characters to represent other words. The Latin script has also gained widespread use, but it is not officially recognized by the Dieuese government.

History
It is said that Dieu diverged from the Vietic languages around 600 BC. Like other Vietic languages at the time, it had an agglutinative morphology and a rich set of consonant clusters, which have subsequently disappeared from the language under Chinese influence. When the Han dynasty invaded Nanyue in the 2nd century BC, Dieu underwent major influence from Chinese lexically and gramatically, due to the use of Classical Chinese in society.

From the 13th century, Dieuese was written with Chu Nom, a Chinese-esque writing system used to write native Vietnamese words. In 1946, Cúk Hiạ́w simplified the script to remove hundreds of characters used to write native words, with the aim to promote literacy.

Phonology
"Main article: Dieu phonology"

Lexicon
Dieu has shared almost 90% of its lexicon with Vietnamese, due to their similar histories. Like Vietnamese, Dieu lost many Proto-Austroasiatic phonological and morphological features that other Austroasiatic langauges share, although less than Vietnamese. French influences are also occasional, but they are mostly used for European cultural terms.

Basic vocabulary
"Main article: Dieu language/basic vocabulary"