Since 09/11/95
Vietnamese
Vietnamese is the mother tongue of sixty million people (1986 data) who call themselves nguoi viet or nguoi kinh, and who occupy mainly the delta lowlands of their s-shaped country. the other ethnic groups-Highlanders, previously called 'Montagnards'--as well as Cambodians, Chinese, and Indians, also use vietnamese as the mainstream language in their daily communication with the Vietnamese. there are also more than a million expatriate vietnamese in Europe, north America, Australia, Japan, and elsewhere, who try to preserve their native language as part of their culture heritage.
General references on the structure of the language are Tran et al. 1943, emeneau 1951, Le 1960, Truong 1970, Nguyen Dinh-Hoa 1971, 1980, 1987, and thompson 1965.
1. genetic relationship. vietnam was ruled by china for ten centuries, from 111 bce to 939 CE, when many chinese loan words entered Vietnamese. because chinese charaters served for a long time both as the medium of written communication among scholars and officials, and as the vehicle of literary expression, people often think mistakenly that vietnamese is derived from chinese or is a dialect of Chinese. actually--like korea and japan--vietnam was merely a pocket of chinese cultural influence. genetically unrelated to Chinese, Vietnamese, belongs to the mon-khmer stock, which comprises mon (spoken in Burma) and khmer (the language of Cambodia), as well as Khmu, Bahnar, bru and other languages of the highlands of Vietnam. mon-khmer is a branch of the large austro-asiatic family [q.v.], which includes several major language groups spoken in a wide area from the chota nagpur plateau of India, in the west, to the indo-chinese peninsula in the east. (For hostorical studies, see maspero 1912, haudricourt 1953, 1954, and gregerson 1969.) {See also southeast asian Languages]
2. writing Systems. there are three distinct writing systems: the chinese characters (chu nho, chu Han 'scholars' script, Han characters); the demotic characters derived from chinese (chu nom 'southern script'; cf. Nguyen Dinh-Hoa 1959); and finally, the roman script'), which has served since 1945 as the conventional orthograpgy throughout the country at all levels of education. the pronunciation of chinese graphs is called 'Sino-Vietnamese'; it is based on that of acient Chinese, which was learned first through the spoken language of the rulers, and later through the writings of chinese philosophers and poets, which local students had to master in order to pass the civil service examinations designed (up to 1918) to recruit a scholar/gentry class. while continuing to use classical chinese for regulated verse as well as prose, both buddhist monks and confusian scholars proudly used their own language to compose eight-line stanzas or long narratives in the native six-eight (luc-bat) meter or its variants; some of these verses were privately blockprinted in the demotic script. this novel script must have been created as soon as sino-vietnamese pronunciation had stabilized, it. around the 11th century; it was already widely used under the Tran dynasty (1225-1400). a collection of 254 vernacular poems left by Nguyen Trai, a15th century scholar, sheds light on ealier phonology. some features of early pronunciation were also recorded in the Vietnamese/Portuguese/Latin dictionary and the Latin/Vietnamese catechism written by the jesuit missionary alexandre de rhodes (rome, 1651). rhodes codified the roman script invented by missionaries from Portugal, Italy, and france to facilitate their efforts in converting vietnamese to Catholicism.
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