Vietnamese is the official language of Vietnam. It is spoken by 86 million people in Vietnam and approximately 4 million overseas Vietnamese. It belongs to the subfamily of Mon-Khmer languages in the Austroasiatic family of languages.

Vietnamese has three main dialects: northern, central and southern. The dialectal differences concern both the vocabulary and the phonetic system. However, the Vietnamese everywhere understand each other despite these dialectal differences.

The Vietnamese language does not have a standard pronunciation. The Hanoi dialect represents the phonetic system of the language more fully than the other dialects. The Vietnamese language used in news broadcasts on Vietnamese radio and television, and in Vietnamese books, newspapers and magazines is mostly based on the Hanoi dialect. The next most significant dialect is the dialect spoken in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), the biggest city in Vietnam and the most important political, economic and cultural center in Southern Vietnam.

This Vietnamese language text introduces the contemporary Hanoi dialect. The phonetic part of the text represents the full system of Vietnamese sounds, and introduces the specific features of the Hanoi pronunciation. The audio portion is recorded by native speakers of the Hanoi dialect.