[lvlrsSTI]

some 60 per cent of Vietnamese vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the parts of China that are closest to Vietnam are the Cantonese-speaking regions of Guangxi and Guangdong. A person who knows Cantonese will be struck by the many Vietnamese words that sound similar, such as nguyen lieu (“raw materials”, yuen liu in Cantonese) and dac biet (“special”, dac beet in Cantonese).