Overseas Vietnamese in the context of Vietnamese people in Germany

Vietnamese (tiếng Việt) is an Austroasiatic language primarily spoken in Vietnam where it is the official language. It belongs to the Vietic subgroup of the Austroasiatic language family. Vietnamese is spoken natively by around 86 million people, and as a second language by 11 million people, several times as many as the rest of the Austroasiatic family combined. It is the native language of ethnic Vietnamese (Kinh), as well as the second or first language for other ethnicities of Vietnam, and used by Vietnamese diaspora in the world.

Like many languages in Southeast Asia and East Asia, Vietnamese is highly analytic and is tonal. It has head-initial directionality, with subject–verb–object order and modifiers following the words they modify. It also uses noun classifiers. Its vocabulary has had significant influence from Middle Chinese and French. Vietnamese morphemes and phonological words are predominantly monosyllabic, however many multisyllabic words do occur, usually as a result of compounding and reduplication.

Vietnamese Americans (Vietnamese: Người Mỹ gốc Việt, Vietnamese pronunciation: [ŋɯəj˨˩ mi˦ˀ˥ ɣŏk˧˦ viət̚˧˨ʔ~ziət̚˧˨ʔ]) are Americans of Vietnamese ancestry. They constitute a major part of all overseas Vietnamese. As of 2023, over 2.3 million people of Vietnamese descent live in the United States, making them the fourth largest Asian American ethnic group. The majority (60%) are immigrants, while 40% were born in the United States. The number includes people of other ethnicities such as Montagnards, Tais, Chams, or Hoa Chinese.

The Vietnamese American population grew significantly after 1975, when a large wave of South Vietnamese refugees arrived in the U.S. following the end of the Vietnam War. Today, over half of Vietnamese-Americans reside in California and Texas, particularly in metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, Houston, and San Jose.

Vietnamese people in France (Vietnamese: Người Pháp gốc Việt; French: Diaspora vietnamienne en France) consist of people of full or partial Vietnamese ancestry who were born in or immigrated to France. Their population was about 400,000 as of 2022, making them one of the largest Asian communities in the country.

Unlike other overseas Vietnamese communities in the West, the Vietnamese population in France had already been well-established before the Fall of Saigon and the resulting diaspora. They make up over half of the Vietnamese population in Europe.

Vietnamese Australians (Vietnamese: Người Úc gốc Việt) are Australians of Vietnamese descent. Vietnamese Australians are one of the largest groups within the global Vietnamese diaspora.

At the 2021 census, 334,781 people stated that they had Vietnamese ancestry (whether alone or in combination with another ancestry), representing 1.3% of the Australian population. In 2021, the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated that there were 268,170 Australian residents who were born in Vietnam.