Vietnamese language in the United States

Vietnamese
Vietnamese language in the United States
Tiếng Việt tại Hoa Kỳ
A bilingual English–Vietnamese sign welcomes visitors to Little Saigon in Garden Grove, California.
Native to	United States
Ethnicity	Vietnamese Americans
Speakers	1.6 million (2019)[1]
Language family	Austroasiatic Vietic Viet–Muong Vietnamese
Dialects	United States Vietnamese
Writing system	Latin (Vietnamese alphabet)
Language codes
ISO 639-1	vi
ISO 639-2	vie[2]
ISO 639-3	–
Glottolog	None
IETF	vi-US
Distribution of Vietnamese in the United States according to the 2000 United States census.

Vietnamese has more than 1.5 million speakers in the United States, where it is the sixth-most spoken language. The United States also ranks second among countries and territories with the most Vietnamese speakers, behind Vietnam. The Vietnamese language became prevalent after the conclusion of the Vietnam War in 1975, when many refugees from Vietnam came to the United States. It is used in many aspects of life, including media, commerce, and administration. In several states, it is the third-most spoken language, behind English and Spanish. To maintain the language for later generations, Vietnamese speakers have established many language centers and coordinated with public school systems to teach Vietnamese to students who are born and raised in the United States.

After several decades of development in a multilingual environment independent of the native country, Vietnamese in the United States has some differences from the Vietnamese language currently spoken in Vietnam, and the community of Vietnamese speakers has consciously tried to preserve those differences.