The Vietnamese Language Standarization:
Issues and Solutions
Lý Toàn Thắng
Institute of Linguistics, Vietnam
Standardization is defined as “any vernacular (language or dialect) would be
'standardized' by providing a unified and consistent norm of the writing that is widely
accepted by its speakers” (Haugen: 1994).
In Vietnam, the standardization has been fostered since the early twentieth century by
scientists, writers, journalists and politicians. The essential content in the concept of
standardization at this time centered on two issues: 1) preserving the identity/color of the
Vietnamese language; and 2) retaining its purity without the overuse of unnecessary loan
words.
The Vietnam Communist Party has paid a special attention to language in its policies on
culture. For example, “Đề cương văn hoá” ( The cultural guidelines) (1943) gave prominence
to the tasks of preserving and developing the Vietnamese language.
Even before the start of Revolution (1945) and during the war of resistance against the
French colonialists (1946-1954), President Ho Chi Minh talked many times about retaining
the purity of the Vietnamese language. He often emphasized on the “correct” usage of words
without overusing foreign loan words and on the development of the Vietnamese language
on its own basis.
Later, the late Prime Minister Pham Van Dong also paid a special attention to preserving
and developing Vietnamese language. He attended and made speeches at the Conferences
on retaining the purity of the Vietnamese language (in 1966 and 1981), greatly contributing to
the emergence of a wide-spread movement in Vietnam on retaining the Vietnamese
language’s purity with the main contents as follow (see Hoang Tue 1981):
- The “purity” of the Vietnamese language is its quintessence; it is important to select
the norms (i.e. standardization) to retain and enhance that purity.
- The standardization of the Vietnamese language means (a) to affirm the values of the
existing norms and request their respect; and (b) to indentify the new norms more suitable to
the development of the Vietnamese language.
- The demand of “retaining the purity of the Vietnamese language” should be parallel
with the demand of “developing the Vietnamese language” : there must be renovations in
the Vietnamese language, especially in the fields of scientific and technological terminologies.
A caution must be taken against "the linguistic purism” which may impede its development.
To have a better understanding why the issue of standardization of the Vietnamese
language arose and why standardization measures are applied in Vietnamese language (which
will be described in the next sections), we need to look back upon the particular historical
development of the Vietnamese language.
Any language that needs to be developed depends on the phenomenon of language
contact or bilingualism in different conditions; of special attention is the language contact
between a dominant language (often highly developed) and a dominated language (often
poorly developed) creating a state of unequal bilingualism. In general, the Vietnamese
language in the thousands year s of its history is “powerless” as compared to Chinese and
French, but it was not declined or disappeared; or it did not become a “pidgin, creole”
language. In contrast, it has sensibly and creatively accepted the elements of thesetwo
languages to become more copious, with an increasing strength to create an equal
bilingualism.
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If the dominant language stands for D and the oppressed language stands for O, the
overal development of the Vietnamese language could be summarized and simplified as
follow:
Chinese / Vietnamese bilingualism --> Chinese - Vietamese bilingualism
French / Vietnamese bilingualism --> French - Vietnamese bilingualism
“ / ” represents the unequal bilingualism and “ - ” denotes the equal bilingualism.
Of special attention here is the role of writing. During the period of Chinese and
Vietnamese bilingualism, the Vietnamese people use the Vietnamese language for everyday
interactions but they use the Chinese characters to write (Han script); and up to the tenth
century, Vietnamese people designed “Nom script” but still basing on Chinese characters.
In the early half of nineteenth century, there were two spoken languages: Vietnamese and
Chinese, there were three orthographies: Chinese characters, Nom script and “Quoc ngu” –
Vietnamese Romanized writing system which was first drafted by Jesuits in the 1620s, but
was printed officially for the first time in Roma in 1651 in the Dictionary and the Creed
compiled by French priest Alexandre de Rhodes.
Since the second half of nineteenth century, the period of French and Vietnamese
bilingualism, the situation was even more complicated with three spoken languages: French,
Vietnamese and Chinese, and four orthographies: French writing, Quoc ngu, Han and Nom
scripts.
Since 1945, with the foundation of the Republic of Vietnam led by President Ho Chi
Minh, the Vietnamese language and writing (Quoc ngu script) gained its dominant position
and became the national language of Vietnam...
This brief sketch of the historical development of the Vietnamese language shows that in
the contact with the Chinese and the French languages, Vietnamese has borrowed many
elements from these two languages, especially from the Chinese language – It is estimated
words of Chinese origin which are scientific terms and compounds account for more than 70
% of the whole Vietnamese vocabulary.
One more thing that deserves our attention is that loan words from the Chinese language
has been so far pronounced by Vietnamese people in special way that was called
“Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation” by linguists. It followed the pronunciation of Tang
dynasty, particularly the Tang pronunciation taught in Giao Châu (the northern division of
Vietnam) in the period of eighth and ninth centuries. For example, shan “mountain”
( Chinese) --> sơn (Vietnamese), Bejing (Chinese) --> Bắc Kinh (Vietnamese).
According to Nguyễn Tài Cẩn (1979) this pronunciation had gradually changed since
Vietnam gained its independence in the tenth century, under the effect of the phonetic rules
and historical phonetics, then separated itself from the pronunciation of Chinese people to
form an independent pronunciation,
system of Vietnamese people with particular
characteristics and functions and history which in theory it could be used to read all books
written by Chinese characters (close to the pronunciation of t Chinese people).
The situation is different with the French language. Everyday vocabularies are
“Vietnamized” by translated equivalent in Vietnamese, for example, bicyclette --> xe đạp
(bicycle), or written and pronounced with some change to imitate Vietnamese style, e.g. gare
--> (nhà) ga (railway station), cyclopousse --> (xe) xích lô (pedicab). And themajority of
scientific terms are transcribed into Vietnamese with some changes to fit the sound system of
the Vietnamese language, e.g. acide--> a xít (acid); However, in some scientific sectors,
especially chemistry and medicine there is tendency to keep the original pronounciation,
for example, benzol (French origin, note that there is no letter “z” and final sound / l / at the
end of the syllable in the Vietnamese language). Another way for transcribing scientific
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〈The Vietnamese Language Standarization:〉Lý Toàn Thắng
terms of French origin is to use Sino-Vietnamese elements to translate equivalently, e.g.
banque --> ngân hàng (bank) (ngân: monetary; hàng: place to sell goods, bussiness office)...
Many words of Indo- Eropean origin in the Vietnamese language have experienced
following ways. At first, their meaning were translated or they were transcribed by
Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation, and then came close to their original writing and
pronunciation. For example, Montesquieu (French origin) --> Mạnh Đức Tư Cưu (written
and pronounced by Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation) --> Mông-tét-ski-ơ (transcribed by
French language with necessary changes to fit the Vietnamese language).
The changes in those approaches mean that there is progress in the conceptualization of
standardization and this was partly due to psycholinguistic reason: Sino-Vietnamese
bilinguals in the early twentieth century tend to think that Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation is
“easier to understand” than Indo- Eropean pronunciation; and French-Vietnamese bilinguals,
and recent Russian-Vietnamese bilinguals and specially English-Vietnamese bilinguals tend
to demand the accuracy in the word usage; e.g. marketing has recently been imported into
Vietnam ( during the renovation and market economy); at first, it was translated as “tiếp thị”
(Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation; tiếp: approaching, thị: market), but recently it tends to be
widely used as mác-két-tinh to present the concept more accurately. Obviously, when it is
possible to translate exactly the Indo- Eropean terms into Vietnamese, the choices will be
Vietnamese or Sino-Vietnamese variants; for example when Vietnam became a member of
ASEAN, the word “đồng thuận” appeared in the Vietnamese language as a result of the
translation of th word “consensus” from English.
In the cases when borrowed words are eithr translated or transcribed, we have two
competing variants and non of them is yet considered as standard; e.g. Festival -->
Phét-ti-van (Indo- Eropean pronunciation) / Lễ hội (Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation)...
Let us now turn to the analysis and description of the most problematic area of the
present Vietnamese standardization – the proper names, neologisms and scientific and
technological terms.
Regarding proper names of the Vietnamese language, the present norm is to write in
capital all the first letters of the syllables. For example, Nguyễn Văn Nam (not written like
before Nguyễn văn Nam or Nguyễn-văn-Nam), Hà Nội (not Hà nội or Hà-nội). However,
there are three different ways to write the offices’ names (ministries, universities, research
institutes, services, departments, bureaus, etc...):
- Capitalizing only the first letter of the first syllable, for example. Trường đại học khoa
học xã hội và nhân văn (this way was mainly applied before the Renovation, before the 1980s,
and was influenced by Russian spelling rules).
- Capitalizing all initial letters of a syllables, for example: Trường Đại học Khoa học
Xã hội và Nhân văn (this way was mainly used after the Renovation, and was influenced by
English and French spelling rules).
- Capitalizing the first letter of immediate components; for example. Trường Đại học
Khoa học xã hội và Nhân văn (this way was also mainly applied after the Renovation day);
the word “xã hội” was not capitalized because in this case it is an attribute for the head noun
“khoa học”.
Regarding foreign proper names, now there are two ways:
- Use their original spelling, for example: New York;
- Use their transcription in Quoc ngu script, for example: New York --> Niu-oóc.
There are two solutions for neologisms and scientific and technological terms as
mentioned above:
- Use loan words but with different spelling ways, e.g. acide (French origin) --> axít / a
xít (acid); fax (English origin) --> phách (fax); font (English origin) --> phông (font of letters);
marketing (English origin) --> maketinh / ma-két-tinh / mác-két-tinh (marketing).
- Use Vietnamese equivalents (with pure Vietnamese or Sino-Vietnamese elements):
satellite --> vệ tinh, spaceship --> tàu vũ trụ.
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However, these two alternatives coexist and no standard has been chosen from one of
them.
In briefs, through the discussion of issues and solutions concerning the standardization
of the Vietnamese language, we can see that each of them embodies a different scientific
viewpoint on protecting and developing a language, on functional styles of a language, on
language planning... in the current situation of globalization, regionalization and integration...
REFERENCES
Haugen E.(1994). Standardization, The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (ed. by
Asher R. E.), Vol. 8. Pergamon Press, Oxford - New York - Seoul - Tokyo.
Hoàng Tuệ (2001). Tuyển tập ngôn ngữ học (Linguistics collections). National University
Publisher. Hồ Chí Minh city.
Nguyễn Tài Cẩn (1979). Nguồn gốc và quá trình hình thành cách đ ọc Hán – Việt (The origin
and the process of forming Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation). Social Sciences
Publishing House. Hà Nội.
Lý Toàn Thắng (2002). Mấy vấn đề Việt ngữ học và ngôn ngữ học đ ại cương ( Some Issues
of Vietnamese Studies and General Linguistics). Social Sciences Publishing House.
Hà Nội.
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