page_title: Northern, central and southern Vietnam
section_title: Linguistic differences
hierarchical_section_title: Northern, central and southern Vietnam / Cultural differences / Linguistic differences
caption_attribution_description: Tiếng Việt: Các vùng phương ngữ của tiếng Việt
context_page_description: Northern Vietnam, Central Vietnam and Southern Vietnam are historic, geographic and cultural regions within Vietnam. Each region consists of subregions, with considerable cultural differences between subregions.
  Northern Vietnam includes the following subregions:
  Northwest
  Northeast
  Red River Delta
  Central Vietnam includes the following subregions:
  North Central Coast
  South Central Coast
  Southern Vietnam includes the following subregions:
  Central Highlands
  Southeast
  Mekong River Delta
context_section_description: The Vietnamese language features many accents, the three major dialects are those of the North, Center, and South with major differences in phonology and vocabulary. Due to cultural prominence, the Hanoi and Saigon accents are mostly intelligible to speakers from other regions. The Central accent, in particular from the provinces of Nghệ An, Hà Tĩnh, Quảng Bình, Quảng Nam, and Quảng Ngãi is often unintelligible to speakers outside of these regions.
  Differences in these accents lie in several different factors, including but not limited to the following:
  Pronunciation of words, an example would be: a Hanoi <d> is pronounced like the English /z/ while a Saigon <d> is pronounced like the English /j/.
  Northern Vietnamese has the full 6 tones, whereas Southern Vietnamese has only 5 (merging two of the tones into one)
  Words ending in "nh" are pronounced differently between North and South (See Vietnamese phonology for details)
  Merging of the "tr" and "ch" sounds in Northern Vietnamese
  Some differences in vocabulary between different regions
  Northerners speak with a higher-pitched accent and frequently pronounce words with a /z/ (even though the letter <z> doesn't exist in the Vietnamese Latin alphabet).
  Central Vietnamese (in the North-Central Coast, from Nghệ An to Thừa Thiên - Huế) speak in a high-pitched, diverse accents. In areas of Nghệ An, people live in different villages could speak in completely different accents.
  Southerners, along with the South Central Coast provinces of Bình Định, Phú Yên, Khánh Hòa, Ninh Thuận and Bình Thuận, speak in a more lower-pitched, more monotone accent, which is also found in the accents of various aboriginal languages spoken by Montagnard hill tribe ethnicities.
  In Central Vietnamese, the number of tones is reduced to 5 (om Quảng Trị and Huế accents) or only 4 (in Hà Tĩnh, Nghệ An and Quảng Bình accents). One of the distinctive feature of Central Vietnamese and Quảng Nam accent is the use of a different set of particles and pronouns, making it stand apart from Northern and Southern Vietnamese. For example, chi, mô, tê, răng and rứa  (what, where, that, why and thus) are used instead of gì, đâu, kìa, sao and vậy in Standard Vietnamese. 
  While these differences may seem superficial to non-Vietnamese speakers, even the difference in phonologyThe vocabularies of the different regions also differ. between Northern and Southern Vietnamese is quite striking.
  Kinship terms are especially affected, as each term has a subtly different meaning in each region. In the South, the eldest child in a family is referred by the ordinal number two, while in the North "number two" refers to the second-eldest child. The vocabularies of the different regions also differ. Vocabulary differences can be confusing as sometimes the same word could have different meaning in each dialects. For example, the word mận refers to two different fruits: it is used for Prunus salicina (a type of plum) in the North, while in the South it refers to Syzygium samarangense (the rose apple). Similarly, dĩa means "disk" in Southern Vietnamese and "fork" in Northern Vietnamese; chè is a dessert in Southern Vietnamese but means "tea" in Northern Vietnamese, ốm means sick in Northern Vietnamese and thin in Southern Vietnamese. "bông" refers to flower in Southern Vietnamese but means cotton in Northern Vietnamese, the word for "fart" in Southern Vietnamese is a curse word in Northern Vietnamese.
  While the entire country lies in the tropics, there is quite a large difference in climate between Northern and Southern Vietnam.
caption: Map of main Vietnamese dialects.
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