mường

Mường (Tiếng Mường) is the closest relative of Vietnamese and the second-largest Austroasiatic language of Vietnam, with ~1.5M speakers concentrated in the upland provinces of Hòa Bình, Thanh Hóa, Phú Thọ, and Sơn La in northern Vietnam. Together with Vietnamese, it forms the Vietic branch of Austroasiatic; the two languages share regular sound correspondences and a large cognate vocabulary (e.g. Mường *đác* ~ Vietnamese *nước* 'water', *ăn* ~ *ăn* 'eat', *mộch* ~ *một* 'one'). Mường is tonal (four tones in most varieties, corresponding historically to the Vietnamese tone system before the six-way Northern split), with a Vietnamese-style Latin orthography used in literacy programmes and a modest published literature. It is a recognised minority nationality language of Vietnam but is not co-official at the national level. Like Vietnamese, Mường has a rich stock of Sino-Vietnamese loanwords alongside its inherited Vietic core vocabulary.