A descriptive introduction to the Vietnamese language is presented. An introductory chapter gives an overview of the population using Vietnamese, its affiliation with Chinese and other languages, dialects, role in religion, history, writing systems, syllabic structure, and body language. Chapter 2 describes its sound system, syllable boundaries, stress and intonation, and changes in these areas. The third and fourth chapters focus on morphology and lexicon, and chapters 5 through 7 enumerate and describe the parts of speech. In chapter 8, the noun phrase is addressed, and in chapter 10, the verb phrase. Sentence structure and types are the subject of the two final chapters. Appended materials include a list of the parts of speech, and three short texts of different types (folk verse, novel excerpt, and newspaper advertisement). Contents are indexed. Contains 212 references.