吗
ma
In real, traceable use. Part of the curated seed collection; community review is coming.
Traditional: 嗎
A particle that turns a statement into a yes-or-no question. Put it at the very end and change nothing else: 你是学生 'you are a student' becomes 你是学生吗. It has a neutral tone, and it is not used when the sentence already has a question word such as 什么 or 谁.
Trợ từ đặt cuối câu để biến câu kể thành câu hỏi có–không, giống “không”, “à” ở cuối câu tiếng Việt. Chỉ cần thêm 吗 vào cuối, không đổi trật tự từ: 你是学生 (bạn là học sinh) thành 你是学生吗. Đọc thanh nhẹ; không dùng khi câu đã có từ để hỏi như 什么, 谁.
ParticleRegister: neutral
Examples
Editorial example (illustrative, not a corpus attestation) — awaiting a native-speaker check
Sources & notes
Hán-Việt bridge batch 063 (2026-11-14). Headword, Traditional form and pinyin checked against CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0) source ↗ · Hán-Việt reading: Unihan kVietnamese source ↗ ; en.wiktionary Vietnamese entries via kaikki.org extract, snapshot 2026-07-31 (CC BY-SA 4.0): Hán-Việt reading 吗/嗎 = ma · No Vietnamese entry is linked as its twin; the Hán-Việt reading is given character by character. Definition, literal gloss and example sentence are original; the example has not had a native-speaker check yet.
Common questions
What does “吗” mean?
A particle that turns a statement into a yes-or-no question. Put it at the very end and change nothing else: 你是学生 'you are a student' becomes 你是学生吗. It has a neutral tone, and it is not used when the sentence already has a question word such as 什么 or 谁.
Is “吗” formal or informal?
吗 is generally neutral.