The story of a nation's language is the story of it's culture. Where did the Vietnamese language come from? Is it a variation of Chinese or Thai? Or is it something altogether unique? Turns out the answer isn't that simple, and it goes right to the roots of the Vietnamese national identity - listen in to find out why.
In this episode, there are 3 questions:
If you're interested in the research resources used for this episode, they can be found here. If you find them useful, please be sure to leave a like and/or a review on our Facebook page!
[00:33] You may have heard something about Vietnam. Maybe you've seen a movie or a documentary about it, or maybe you've tried some Phở, heard about the coffee or maybe, you know, someone or have family out here, but outside of that, you don't know much about it, except that you keep hearing about the buzz from this country that everyone's talking about.
[00:49] Well, if you want to know more about this fascinating and seriously fast growing country, then this podcast is for you, because across episodes or even series of episodes, we will be giving you both a big-picture overview, and a closer, rubber-hits-the-road look at different areas of Vietnam's modern life, culture, food, history, and society, one area at a time.
[1:14] So the first series of which this is the first episode is about the Vietnamese language, because that's probably one of the first walls you'll run into when visiting this country. And it's a fascinating topic because it runs right to the roots of this country's history and culture.
And so what you're going to learn about in this first series of episodes on the Vietnamese language is the historical origins of the Vietnamese language and where it came from. And later on, we'll explore whether Vietnamese is a difficult language to learn. And then through talks with students and teachers have a look at what it's like to study Vietnamese today.
[1:50] So if you're interested or thinking about studying Vietnamese, then definitely stay tuned for the later episodes. But without further ado, let's get into the focus of this episode. Where is Vietnamese from?
[2:05] Now, today's topic is a big topic. So why don't we start with a game? I'll describe some linguistic features of Vietnamese and you try to guess which language family you think Vietnamese belongs to. Okay. So the first is that it's:
[2:47] So bearing all this in mind, which language family does it sound like Vietnamese belongs to? And I'll give you three options: Thai, Cambodian, or Chinese.
[3:07] Now the answer might not be what you expect. And in this episode, we'll cover three key questions.
[3:35] Now just as a disclaimer, I'm not actually a linguist or an anthropologist or a historian by training or by study. I'm just a lay person who's become really interested in the subject. And when I was planning this episode, I thought it would actually be a fairly simple topic just to kind of summarize the linguistic or historical origins of Vietnamese. But as it turns out, it's actually a very complex topic and there are some fairly controversial bits. And so in this episode, all I try to do is highlight where some of these areas are. And, you know, if I do misrepresent, overemphasize or underemphasize, any particular point or issue, then I do apologize. My aim is really just to show why this is such an interesting area. And also, if you're interested in the resources that are used in the research for this episode, I put them in the show notes and they're linked on the website and on our Facebook page. So you can look them up if you want to learn more.
So would that all said on with the show!
Q1: Where is Vietnamese from?
[4:43] Now, question one. “Where is Vietnamese from?” Before we get stuck into this question properly, you need to understand a bit about how you trace language families. So how can you tell if two languages are related? Well, there are a lot of different things that linguists look at, but the main thing is the vocabulary that they share.
[5:05] So if you compare two sets of the same vocabulary in two different languages, and there are clear patterns in the way they are spoken or written, then that's a big clue. So the Polynesian languages are a good example of this. So in Tongan, the number one is taha, in Samoan it's tasi, and in Maori it's tahi. And the number two in Tongan is ua, in Samoan it's lua, and in Maori it's rua. And so similarities, like these show, these languages are related, and also how we know, believe it or not, that English and Hindi belong to the same family, the Indo-European super language family.
[5:52] Now note it's the type and not the quantity of vocabulary that counts. So basically, similarities in basic everyday vocabulary count more than similarities in higher or cultural or intellectual vocabulary. So, the reason is that in cases of linguistic contact - so that's when you have two groups of people who speak different languages, but who may be trade or intermarry - then this kind of language is more easily or more likely to be borrowed. So maybe like one group doesn't have a word for this unique tool or special farming method or one group's version is easier to say, so they borrow it. And so groups often borrow language to do with government, law, medicine or literature because you just don't use it that often. And there's not as much attachment to it, but when it comes to everyday stuff, you're less likely to change how you say that because you know, that's the heart of your language and people don't give up that very easily. So stuff different groups tend not to borrow are numbers, pronouns, basic verbs, and the core grammar surrounding this basic language.
[6:55] Okay. So what about Vietnamese? Now, if you thought that the answer to the question that I started the episode with was Chinese, then you’d be in very good company, because the original scholars who started looking at this question in or around the 1800s, saw all of these Chinese features, the tones, the one syllable words, the Chinese vocabulary, the writing system, and they thought of course, Vietnamese is just a kind of Chinese. And there was very little doubt about this, the case was basically closed.
[7:26] But the problem was, even though they share lots of vocabulary, most of it isn't actually basic. And it was only in 1856 when a linguist called James Logan, compared Vietnamese with languages in the Mon-Khmer family, so these are languages spoken in like Myanmar or Cambodia, and he found that they shared quite a bit of vocabulary. So he was the first person to make a connection between this Mon-Khmer language family, and Vietnamese. But there was a lot of reluctance to accepting this, especially because no one could explain the tones.
[8:05] And this was the point of a French linguist who said in the early 1900s, he pointed out that look, the Mon-Khmer language family has no tones, so you've got to explain that. And he thought that Vietnamese belonged to the Tai family, so that's T-A-I, to which the Thai language, which is T-H-A-I belongs, and he pointed to some words that they seem to share to support his thesis.
[8:36] And this sort of went round and round for a little bit until the big knockout blow in about 1956, and this came from another French linguist, a guy called Andre Haudricourt. And what he did was he showed how the tones in Vietnamese evolved internally within the Mon-Khmer language family.
[9:00] And when I say it like that, I don't think it really captures how much of a bombshell this was, but it really was because prior to this, no one had any real idea about how tones can develop in a total us language, except borrowing them from other languages that already have them. But if you think about it, they had to come from somewhere, right? But we just didn't know how that happened.
[9:15] So what was his big idea? Well, he observed that certain consonant sounds and the Mon-Khmer languages match the tones in Vietnamese. Okay so if you took a Mon-Khmer word and it had a hard starting consonant sound (and hard is just my word because I want to avoid some of the technical linguistic terminology that these linguists use), but it has a hard starting consonant sound and no ending. And I’ll just make up a word, it's pa, right, P-A, pa. Right then the word corresponding in Vietnamese would have a flat tone.
[9:58] But if you change that starting consonant sound to a soft consonant sound, so let's say B-A, ba, right? And it has no ending, then this would correspond with a falling tone in the Vietnamese word.
[10:12] And if you took a word with a hard starting sound and a hard ending in the Mon-Khmer language like P-A-K, pak, right? Then the Vietnamese word would likely correspond with a rising tone. So it sounded more like pák, pák, right?
[10:28] And if you had a word with a soft consonant starting sound in a hard ending, like B-A-K, bak, right then in Vietnamese, this would correspond with a throaty, stop tone, so it’d sound more like bạk, bạk you know, the tone would really drop.
[10:49]And so in a nutshell, this is how you get the tones in Vietnamese. The words start off with these consonant sounds and they naturally develop tonal inflections depending on the kind of consonant sounds they have. Then eventually, the consonants drop off, or they merge, and you’re just left with the tones. And so in this way, that is how languages got their tones.
[11:20] And it's interesting because this process doesn't have to take centuries. So apparently there's a dialect of Cherokee spoken in Oklahoma, which has tones, but it's sister dialect in North Carolina doesn't, and they only separated linguistically in 1838 - so this is like less than 200 years ago.
[11:38] And to look at it from a slightly different angle - could you imagine, just for a moment, the possibility of some remote community of English speakers, like maybe in Scotland or South Africa or South Carolina, or the, the South Island of New Zealand, you know, developing a regional dialect of English with tones in it within the next 150 to 200 years? Now, I mean, of course we're all products of our specific time in history, but to me, that just sounds absolutely bizarre. But what this research into Cherokee dialects suggest is that it's absolutely possible.
[12:14] And Haudricourt’s critical insight into Vietnamese tones also did another really big thing, which is that it let us reconstruct the ancestors of many modern languages of Southeast Asia and ancient Chinese, because if you know what the tones are, then you can kind of reverse the process and, across a lot of different, like say dialects, you can guess at what the proto or ancestor language sounded like. And I'm oversimplifying a hugely complex field, but my point is that the entire field of this research, and everything we know about our ancestor languages owes a huge debt to the work that this guy and his research on Vietnamese tones did. So there you go.
[13:00] But back to the main point - Haudricourt’s conclusion meant that Vietnamese didn't have to come from a tonal language. And so along with the shared vocabulary, it was taken as essentially settling the debate on the Mon-Khmer - Vietnamese language relationship. And still not everybody agrees. So, I mean, still people think it's a Tai language, others think that it's closer to the Austronesian family, which is the one which the Polynesian languages belong to, and this just kind of shows ultimately how much guesswork is involved in this kind of study.
[13:35] But ultimately Mon-Khmer is where the debate seems to have settled so far. And there has been some recent study on minor Vietic languages. And these are languages spoken by communities of ethnic minorities in the Vietnamese highlands, and some of these communities number in the hundreds of speakers, so they're tiny communities. But the languages that they speak seem to strengthen the connection between Vietnamese and the Mon-Khmer language family because although they're very similar to Vietnamese in some ways, they preserve a lot of the Mon-Khmer grammar structure and word formation. And so they kind of show what the Vietnamese evolutionary chain from its Mon-Khmer origins to modern day Vietnamese might've looked like.
[14:23] And just as a final point on this whole debate, A really interesting point is one made by a linguist called William Gage, who once described Vietnamese as a “maverick”, so kind of like a linguistic renegade. And what he means is this: If Mon-Khmer is the correct classification, it's a weird one because it means that like, Mon-Khmer is a language family with 120 million speakers. 70 to 80% of them speak a language that just doesn't look like any of the other languages in that family. Because as we mentioned, Vietnamese has these things that other Mon-Khmer languages don't have - it's like tones, the monosyllabic words, the huge amount of Chinese loanwords and a Chinese-based writing script. And so it's like the odd one out compared to all the other languages, but it is by far the biggest member of that group, in terms of speakers.
[15:21] So, putting this all together, maybe we shouldn't be too surprised that everybody was confused for so long. And if you guessed Chinese, then don't feel too bad about it. But if you guessed Cambodia, then well done! A hundred points to you.
Question 2: How did Vietnamese get to be the modern language we know it as today, and why is it controversial?
[15:43] Okay. So question two. How did Vietnamese get to be the language that we know it is today? Now to understand this, we need to know a bit more about the general history of Vietnam to see what was going on at the time.
[15:58] So the most common starting point of Vietnamese history is about 2000 years ago, just before the Chinese turned up. And at this time the ethnolinguistic ancestors of the Vietnamese were living in the Red River Delta, which is in Northern Vietnam and in, or around 100BC, China invades, and it takes over the whole area and it calls it Jiao Zhi, makes it a province of China. And it stays here for about a thousand years and this massive intercultural contact puts a lot of Chinese, the language and the culture, into Vietnamese.
[16:37] And so fast forward to round1000 AD. The Tang Chinese dynasty is collapsing and the reasons are all of the usual suspects: in-fighting, invasion and famine. And in, and amongst this collapse, the first independent Vietnamese kingdom takes hold. And it's independent for about 850 to 900 years, except for a brief period when the Chinese came back in 1400 and took everything back for about 20 years before being kicked out again. But in this time of independence, Vietnam is still mimicking a lot of Chinese traditional social practices, maybe using the Chinese based writing system. And so the Chinese culture and language in Vietnam continues to develop.
[17:25] And then to wrap everything up, the French turn up and around the 1800s and they make French the national language, and then they're kicked out, and then the Americans come and then they're kicked out, and then the Soviet union breaks up. Then English becomes the modern language of trade. And so Vietnamese start studying English in very large numbers. And so that in a nutshell is a history of the Vietnamese language.
[17:53] So, as you can see from this short recap, Vietnam spent long periods under colonial rule. And this is the main paradigm through which most Vietnamese history is told. It's of this idea of this core cultural group that survived under centuries of foreign domination to take their independence and become the modern day Vietnamese country and culture and people that lives on today. And llinguistics takes this narrative too. So the Mon-Khmer classification is proof of the existence of this underlying group that feeds into this “survivor” narrative of history.
[18:40] So why is this controversial? Well, what's interesting is that modern linguistics seems to be uncovering facts that paint a different picture. So, one example of this is the research of John Phan, a professor at Columbia university, and he has what I'd call like the “language shift theory” of the Vietnamese language.
[19:03] And so his key idea is this: that modern Vietnamese was born, or at least conceived through a process of language shift. And let me just explain the concept of language shift. It's when one group of language speakers switch from speaking their own language to another language. And it might sound a bit weird at first, but it actually happens more often than you might think. And it usually follows a large societal or cultural event. So examples of this might be the Gauls, who are like the ancestors of the French in Europe, when they go from speaking, their ancient language of Gaulish to Latin when the Romans take over and conquer everything. Or the Irish in the 19th century, they went from speaking Irish to English, in part due to English, colonialism and the economic situation at the time. And even in my country of birth, New Zealand, where the indigenous language Maori was discouraged by the government and children were actually punished for speaking it in schools, and Maori people actually switched to speaking English because that's just how you got the jobs at the time. And so the language was actually almost completely destroyed until maybe 1987 when the New Zealand government realized what a truly weaselly and horrible thing that was to do and has since helped revive it, thankfully. And so that is kind of how language shift happens.
[20:40] Now, coming back to Vietnam, John Phan thinks that language shift happened to Vietnamese too. But not in the way that you might think - it wasn't Vietnamese switching to and being absorbed into Chinese, it was the other way around when Chinese speakers switched from speaking Chinese to Vietnamese’s ancestor language, proto-Viet-Muong. And by the way, Muong is Vietnamese’s sister language, which is still spoken today in parts of Vietnam, and it's thought to share an ancestor with the Vietnamese language, so that's called proto-Viet-Muong.
[21:14] Now you might ask, Lee, what wasn't Vietnam dominated by China. How did Vietnam Vietnamese end up absorbing Chinese? So let's go back back to 1000 AD and you remember that the ancient Chinese empire is falling apart, right? So the Imperial government is in retreat and the colonial government and Jiao Zhi is losing power and eventually is overthrown. And as you can imagine, many, if not most of the dominant clans or political elements in Jiao Zhi at the time are Chinese, and so to survive, they need to assimilate or collaborate with the non-Chinese elements. So these are like the non-Chinese clans or the mixed clans, who also hold power, and John Phan suggests there were actually quite a few of these at the time. But this shift in political power, puts Proto-Viet-Muong into the driving seat as a language in the region. So as political power shifts, so people start speaking Proto-Viet-Muong.
[22:19] And it wouldn't have happened quickly. John Phan thinks it would have taken several generations for the societal elites in Jiao Zhi to slowly switch from speaking Chinese to Proto-Viet-Muong. But in this process, they brought a lot of Chinese with them and sort of “dragged” Chinese into Proto-Viet-Muong, and then eventually Proto-Viet-Muong evolves into Muong and Vietnamese. And we’re not exactly sure when, John Phan thinks it could have been maybe a century or two afterwards.
[22:53] But then why is this theory controversial? So, this language shift event came just before Vietnamese evolved into its own language. So it put a huge amount of Chinese into Vietnamese. And just to give you an idea, by the way, three quarters of the vocabulary of Vietnamese can be traced back to some form of Chinese or ancient Chinese, or old Chinese. So you’re really talking about a defining moment for the language, when a bunch of this Chinese gets put into Vietnamese. So then if John Phan’s theory is correct, then this event, which is like the birth, or at least, you know, the conception of Vietnamese is a language - because it was still Proto-Viet-Muong at the time - it involved Proto-Viet-Muong going, “Uh, hey Chinese, like see you later, we're out of here”, and the Chinese speakers going “Hey, no, no, wait for me.” Like in other words, Chinese was dominated by Proto-Viet-Muong and not the other way around.
[23:55] And John Phan is not uncontroversial. So another academic James Chamberlin takes issue with him on a number of points. He says that the language shift probably happened two to three centuries before the Tang dynasty fell apart, and it wasn't in the Red River Delta in Northern Vietnam, which is traditionally seen as the cradle of Vietnamese civilization, but just South in the Ca river shelter, because that's where the ancestors of the Muong people likely came from, through the Mu Gia pass and out of Laos. And this is interesting because it would arguably then put the birthplace of the Vietnamese language there, and not in Northern Vietnam as is often assumed.
[24:34] And as a lay person, it is, it's too impossible to figure out who has the stronger argument or how correct any of this is. But I think the bigger point, which I hope to leave you with. Is that the history of the Vietnamese language is still being figured out. And it's definitely not as simple as any one narrative might make it.
Question 3: What are the modern influences on the Vietnamese Language?
[25:00] So we’ve just finished question two, which is “How did Vietnamese become the language it is today?” And now we go into the last question three, which is “What are the modern influences of Vietnamese in the recent past, and today?”
[25:20[ So in terms of modern influences, you're mainly talking about French and English. And so for French, the main factor is colonisation, which started in the mid to late 1800s and where French became the national language. And it was still used in fact, by the South Vietnamese governments after 1954, when the French were finally kicked out. And one of the biggest developments in this time was the introduction of a Romanised writing script.
[25:47] So just to give you a brief history of the writing, basically, they started way back when with “Chữ Hán”, which are the Chinese characters that were borrowed into Vietnamese and sort of given a Vietnamese pronunciation. And this was used by the scholars and amongst the government administrators to write their decrees and their laws and their books, et cetera.
[26:13] But the problem with the system was it's kind of like a ‘square peg-round hole’ situation.
So I don't know exactly how it works, but I kind of imagine it’d be like trying to capture English using Chinese characters. So you'd have lots of the aspects of the English language that would make it difficult to use Chinese characters. Like what would you do with multi-syllable words or what would you do with the plurals or the conjugations? Would you have all of these extra words that you'd need to make up? So with the Vietnamese scholars and writers of the time, they faced a similar problem. And so they had to start inventing their own characters to better capture the spoken language. So this is where you get “Chữ Nôm”, which is like the extension of the original Chữ Hán characters - or if you're a gamer like me, it's like the expansion pack.
[27:00] And we're not exactly sure when it started, but definitely by the 15th century it's in full swing. And this is a period where literature flourishes because the authors and the writers and the poets are playing with traditional Chinese literary structures, but are using the Vietnamese spoken language. And so to put it in today's terms, I suppose it might be like remixing Shakespearian lyrics into hip hop beats or something. And then this time you get some of the greats of the Vietnamese literary Canon being produced. So for example, like the Tale of Kieu, which is basically the Shakespeare of Vietnamese literature. So it's really a sort of hyper creative time.
[27:45] After this, the Portuguese missionaries start showing up and they start Romanizing the script to make it easy for them to learn and then to spread their gospel. And this was finally codified by a guy called Alexander de Rhodes, who sounds like an amazing fellow because he was allegedly preaching in Vietnamese six months after his arrival. But he was the one who pulled it all together.
[28:13] And, at first was a resistance to this sort of, like imperialist, invader script. And I think it seems like the French government actually made it mandatory as part of an attempt to stamp out traditional Vietnamese culture. But the thing is it actually made Vietnamese much easier to learn and literacy shot up after it took hold and nationalist movements embraced it as a way to spread the revolutionary message. And now it's the official national alphabet.
[28:48] Now, another interesting point about the influence of the modern languages is the groups of vocabulary that they contributed to. So with French, you see this mostly in the areas of food, fashion, and modern infrastructure. So the words like “bia” or “cà phê”, obviously from the French word for beer and coffee. And “pho mai”, which is from the French word “fromage”,, which means cheese, or “cà vạt”, which is from the French word for tie, which is “cravate”. And then “ga”, which is from the French word “gare”, which means train station.
[29:16] And in English, you see words that are more to do with modern technology or modern developments, such as like “tivi” or “in-tơ-nét”, or much more recently “vi rút Corona”, the meaning of which, I will let you guess.
[29:36] And there's another element in all of this that's not really talked about that much. And I just mention it to complete the historical picture, but it's the time when Russian became the dominant language in Vietnam.
[29:48] So after 1954 as the influence of the French started to fall away, and you had this split between the North and the South, in the North it was allied with Soviet Russia, and so Russian became the dominant foreign language learned, and in the South as it was allied with America, it was English. So after the end of the war in 1975, Soviet Russia became Vietnam's key ally. And up until 1986, Russian became the main foreign language.
[30:20] And just to give you an idea of how big this was like, At the time, the government set educational targets where 70% of the school pupils were to study Russian 20% study French and 10% study English. And so the study of Russian really grew quickly, especially in the South. And so hundreds of Vietnamese students went to Russia to study at universities, and so it would have taken and brought back the Russian language with them. But what Russian is really remarkable for is not so much like its impact, but the lack thereof on the language, as far as I can tell, and I could be completely wrong about this. And if, if I am someone, please let me know, but I couldn't find any sign of borrowing or exchange except for, and thank you, Mark Edwards for pointing this out to me, a list of Russian cities and the word “kulak”, which is. A derogatory Russian word for dirty old peasant. And besides this, you know, it, there, there isn't really much, and possibly 20 to 30 years was just too short of a time for already meaningful exchange to occur.
[31:42] But in any case, this led to the next development, which was the rise of English. And so everything changed in 1986. The country was an absolute shambles. After more than 10 years of Soviet style, central-planning and the government basically threw down the handbrake, pulled a hot smokin’ donut on the economy and implemented “Dổi mới”, which means renovation or new changes and opened up the country's economy to international trade, which led to the rise of English.
[32:20] And with this, the study of English boomed, like it was seen as a ticket to better jobs, not just in tourism, but an all sorts of business sectors. And it was made compulsory at upper secondary school and is now actually compulsory at all levels of secondary schooling and an elective at primary schooling.
[32:38] And there have been some problems with the teaching of English in Vietnam that are quite notable. So it was such a big focus that the gun government instituted a 10-year plan for the improvement of teaching and learning foreign languages in the education system - but mainly focusing on English and the overarching goal was to have most Vietnamese school, college and university graduates be able to speak English independently, at least to a, B1 level on the common European framework of reference, which is just another way of saying it's about an intermediate level of English, which means you beyond the basics, and you can talk about basic topics, but you can't yet work or study exclusively in that language.
[33:19] Now the project was ambitious. It included the rewriting of the national English, language curriculum, and a lot of teacher training and language training. And it cost about half a billion US dollars, which, you know, for a developing country is a big deal.
[33:40] Unfortunately, it turns out that the targets were a bit too ambitious and the whole thing was described in one national newspaper as a “flop”. And it looks like there were problems with the infrastructure and capacity for doing this training, which means that, you know, they couldn't really push through all the training that they wanted to. But even though the aims of the project weren't met, it hasn't stopped a lot of Vietnamese really embracing English.
[34:07] And so one of the really interesting things about, you know, the influence of English is the growing phenomenon of Vietglish. And Vietglish is where people basically borrow English words for Vietnamese and chop them into sentences, straight into conversation.
[34:23] And so some of these words are like modern day words, like “training” or “meeting”. Um, but even everyday things like, “thanks”, “sorry”, “busy”, or “hi” and “bye” are being taken and adopted. So it's really common, for example, for people to say like “hi anh” or “bye anh”. And “anh” is like the pronoun that means like older brother, and you'd use it to address anyone who is a male, who is a little bit older than you. And even my landlady, like when she texts me, she says like, “thanks con”, you know, like after I’ve paid the rent or something and here, by the way, “con” is like the pronoun for ‘child’ because she's much older than me, so that's like the correct pronoun to use. She says “thanks”. And when she does it, she writes it “T-K-S”, so she's like using the text speak of English, which I just think is fantastic.
[35:18] And there has been some reported concern about the speakers of Vietglish, primarily around how it might spoil their Vietnamese, and so I found this article back in from 2005. And even though it acknowledges the benefit of English being familiarised within Vietnamese culture, it notes that many people use English in this way just to show off to each other. But if you actually put them in front of a foreigner, they couldn't actually put a full sentence together.
[35:53] So, I mean, it's kind of interesting because it, it mirrors some of the concerns that language preservation societies around the world have, like, for example, like l’Academie Francaise in France, which frequently complains about having to protect the French from the invasion of English. And while it might seem a bit far fetched to see English as a threat to Vietnamese, I have anecdotally heard of some Vietnamese families who speak English so exclusively - so like maybe the parents studied overseas and now they work in international companies and the kids now go to international schools - that it is weakening their children's grasp of Vietnamese. Which is what a teacher of IELTS here mentioned to me when the students in the class couldn't think of the Vietnamese translation for some, some fairly standard English word.But as I said, this is completely anecdotal.
[36:48] And finally, it's not just English, like nowadays Chinese is finding its way back and through it's highly popular, modern pop culture. So Vietnamese people might refer to a “soái ca”, which is a corruption of “shuài ge”, which means “hot guy” in Chinese.
[37:05] So in the end, the impression that I'm left with, and then I hope you get a sense of, is how complex language really is and how many things are still happening with Vietnamese even today. And in the end. They say that language is culture, culture is language, so in a way, I think it does offer a fascinating glimpse into where modern Vietnamese culture is going today.
[37:33] So to round everything up. We asked three questions today. Question 1 was “where's Vietnamese from?”, and the answer is it's not 100% settled, but the consensus seems to be it's a Mon Khmer language. So if you take the idea of a layer cake, it's got this hard biscuity foundation of a Mon Khmer language, and has had some thick, creamy layers of Chinese in the middle, and is finished off with some French icing on the top with a few naughty English sprinkles in there.
[38:05] Question 2 was “why is it controversial?” Because research is starting to show a different picture of history than the traditional historical accounts, the example being John Phan’s language shift theory. And I think the bigger message out of this part is stay tuned because this promises to be a very interesting area in future.
[38:27] And so question 3, “what are the modern influences of Vietnamese?” - you're talking mainly about French and English. And things like Vietglish are showing how the Vietnamese are adapting the English language and other cultural aspects into their daily lives, for better or for worse. And it is an issue that has been a long running debate and probably will be for many generations to come.
[38:53] Thank you for listening to the first episode of footbridge to Vietnam. I hope you liked it. And if you want any of the resources I use for the research, check out the show notes or our Facebook page, and if you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.
[39:05] Now, if you liked this episode, stay tuned for the next one. In this Vietnamese language series it's on whether Vietnamese is a difficult language to learn, and you might be surprised at what you find out.
[39:17] Finally, first episode, it's a big moment. It's a shout out to the person help you bring this podcast to life, Dana Drahos. She's a podcast producer here in Saigon, runs workshops and courses for new podcasters, and her podcast is called Creators in Saigon, where she interviews people working in the creative sector here. So be sure to check that out if that's your jam. Thanks again for listening guys and see you next time.