What are the six tones of Vietnamese?

Vietnamese has six tones: ngang (level, no mark), sắc (rising, acute accent), huyền (falling, grave accent), hỏi (dipping, hook above), ngã (broken, tilde) and nặng (heavy, dot below). Each is shown by a distinct diacritic over or under the main vowel.

How does the tool know which tone a syllable has?

It Unicode-normalises each syllable to NFD form, separating base letters from combining marks. It then looks for the acute, grave, hook-above, tilde, or dot-below combining character and maps it to the matching tone. No mark means the level (ngang) tone.

Does it confuse vowel-shape marks with tone marks?

No. Letters like â ê ô ơ ư carry shape diacritics (circumflex, horn) that are not tone marks. The tool only counts the five tone marks plus the unmarked level tone, ignoring circumflex and horn shapes.

What counts as a syllable here?

Vietnamese is written with one tone per spelled syllable, and syllables are separated by spaces. The tool treats every whitespace-separated token containing a vowel as one syllable, stripping surrounding punctuation.

Is my text uploaded anywhere?

No. All classification happens in your browser using built-in Unicode normalisation. The text never leaves your device.

Vietnamese Tone Classifier

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Vietnamese is a tonal language in which the same string of letters can mean completely different things depending on its tone. This tool scans a passage and counts how many syllables carry each of the six tones, giving you a quick profile of the tonal texture of a text.

How it works

Every Vietnamese syllable carries exactly one tone, marked by a diacritic on its main vowel (or, for the level tone, by the absence of any mark). The classifier Unicode-normalises each syllable to decomposed (NFD) form, which splits a character such as ấ into a base a, a circumflex, and an acute combining mark. It then checks only for the five tone combining marks and maps each one:

acute  (U+0301) → sắc    (rising)
grave  (U+0300) → huyền  (falling)
hook   (U+0309) → hỏi    (dipping)
tilde  (U+0303) → ngã    (broken)
dot    (U+0323) → nặng   (heavy)
none           → ngang  (level)

Shape marks like the circumflex on â/ê/ô and the horn on ơ/ư are deliberately ignored, because they change the vowel quality rather than the tone.

Example and tips

The classic minimal set ma má mà mả mã mạ (“ghost, cheek, but, tomb, horse, rice seedling”) contains one syllable of every tone, so it tallies as 1 in each of the six rows. For best results paste plain prose; numbers, Latin loanwords, and tokens without a vowel are skipped so they do not distort the count.