Vietnamese Pronunciation: Part 2 -- Vowels

When trying to speak any language, knowing how to pronounce vowels is of utmost importance, because when you mispronounce a vowel, well, hilarity ensues.

What I meant to say was:	What I said was:
No, I'm full.	No, I'm fool.
He beat me in the end.	He bit me in the end.
I'll go today.	I'll go to die.

More often than not, I make the frustrating error of switching the vowels "o" and "ow" when I try talking in Mandarin. I say yào (want) when I mean to say yǒu (have). When I duck into a tea shop and try to order, I end up asking the clerk if she wants any milk tea. She just gawks, "Um, wha?" Oh what a difference a vowel makes.

For the next few posts, I'm giving myself a crash course in the phonetics of Vietnamese. I know being able to speak a language well depends on whether I can say the vowels properly, so I began with a brief investigation into the vowels of the Vietnamese alphabet.

First, the letters themselves. Compared with English, which has five or sometimes six vowels, Vietnamese has eleven. Include the y and the total of vowel letters amounts to a nice even number twelve.

a	e	o	u
ă	ê	ô	ư
â	i	ơ	y

Vietnamese vowels look a lot like ours. Half of them are embellished with diacritics. Floating above or dangling from the side of the vowel, diacritcal marks differentiate the sounds the letters make. These marks indicate the exact pronunciation of that vowel, a specificity we're not entitled to in English. For example, look at the words wind, lead, tear, desert, and number. These words can be pronounced two different ways, and you don't know the word's meaning until you know its context. Some other ambiguous vowels in action:

The learned rebel learned to rebel.

Bambi does live with live does.

The minute dove dove in a minute.

Unlike in English, the pronunciation of each Vietnamese vowel is fixed. You always know how it sounds. According to the International Phonetic Association, or IPA, most of the Vietnamese vowels are also used in American English. Note: vowels marked by * are an approximate and have no real English equivalent.

a = spa	e = bed	o = law	u = boot
ă = stock	ê = play	ô = row	ư = eh*
â = hut	i = fee	ơ = uh*	y = fee

You can combine single vowel sounds, or monophthongs, into combinations of two (dipthongs) or three (tripthongs). Unfortunately, there's not a lot of information out there on how to pronounce these combinations. I scoured the internets to find English equivalents, but many have none. This is all I found so far:

ai = aisle	eo = ?	ua, uô = ?	ieâ = deal
ao = bough	êu = ?	ui = bouy	iêu, yêu = ?
au = about	ia, ya, iê, yê = ?	ưi = *	uôi = ?
âu = ?	iu, yu = ?	ưu = *	ươi = *
ay = bite	oi = boy	ưa, ươ = *	ươu = *
ây = ?	ôi = ?
aê = hat	ơi = *

I really wish I could find English equivalents for all of these sounds. Alas, this is as far as I can go for now. The only tool I can find that would help me are the the phonetic codes used in the IPA vowels chart. With this chart, I could stitch the vowels together in my mind and make subjective approximations. Of course, my results would be biased by my Northeastern US accent. It seems like a lot of work with a very good chance of failure. So, I think I'll consult some multi-lingual friends, see what they have to say, then come back and update this post. Coming up next post: consonants.

1. Tim Bowyer. American English. www.fonetiks.org/engsou2am.html


Provender
- breakfast: mì at the noodle shop next to our apartment
- lunch: home cooking -- lāo miàn
- dinner: home cooking -- Korean-style soup noodles with green beans, tofu skin, and egg