There are two genders for nouns in most of the Munda tongues, animate and inanimate. Suffixes and particles placed after the noun are used to express such features as number and possession, which are often indicated in Indo-European tongues by case inflection. Vietnamese is basically monosyllabic, but it has many words of two or more syllables. It is also tonal, with six tones that frequently help to distinguish homonyms. Vietnamese uses particles but has no prefixes and suffixes.
Word order is very important for showing grammatical relationships since there is no inflection.
The vocabulary has many loanwords from Chinese. An alphabet based on Roman letters and adapted for Vietnamese, as by adding diacriticals, is generally used today in place of the traditional Chinese-type writing of the past. The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Click here to shop the Bartleby Bookstore .