 |
Serving
Students at
Santa Ana
College and
Santiago
Canyon College
VIETNAM
Language
|
Languages:
Official
Language: Vietnamese
Other
Languages: Khmer, Montagnard, Cham, various Chinese dialects
and tribal languages, English, French, Chinese and occasionally Russian
and German
The most
widely spoken foreign languages in Vietnam are Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin),
English, French and Russian. English is not spoken by all officials;
a knowledge of French can be useful.
Vietnamese,
the official language, is the mother tongue of the vast majority of the
people and is understood by many national minority members. According
to a widely accepted theory, Vietnamese is believed to be related to the
Austroasiatic family of languages, which includes various languages, dialects,
and subdialects spoken in mainland Southeast Asia from Burma to Vietnam.
Mon-Khmer
Influence
Scholarship
nonetheless is tentative on whether Vietnamese, which was spoken in the
Red River Delta long before the Christian era, was influenced by Mon-Khmer
or Tai, both Austroasiatic subsets. Scholars propose Kinh, the language
spoken in Vietnam belongs to 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.
Classical
Chinese Influence
Actually,
the Vietnamese language was influenced more by classical Chinese than by
any other language. During more than 1,000 years of Chinese rule
and for centuries afterwards, Chinese was the language of officialdom,
scholarship, and literature. The Chinese language had special status
because of its identification with the ruling class of scholar-officials.
Nevertheless,
Vietnamese
continued to be the popular language, even though knowledge of Chinese
was a prerequisite to government employment and social advancement.
Chu
Nom
Beginning
in the eighth or ninth century, the Vietnamese devised a popular script
based on Chinese characters to express written ideas and to standardize
the phonetics of their own language. Well developed by the thirteenth
century, this system, which combined ideographs and phonetics, became the
medium for a growing popular literature. The system is known as chu
nom, literally "southern character" or "southern writing," or simply nom.
Although disdained by orthodox Confucian scholars, chu nom had a distinct
place in the evolution of Vietnam's vernacular literature through the end
of the nineteenth century.
Quoc
Ngu
In the
seventeenth century, the Vietnamese language evolved further when Portuguese
and French missionaries developed a new transcription that used roman letters
instead of Chinese characters. The new system, called quoc ngu, was
devised as a tool for their missionary activities, including the translation
of prayer books and catechisms. By the end of the nineteenth century,
it had become the common method of writing, gradually replacing classical
Chinese and chu nom. Quoc ngu uses diacritical marks above or below
letters to indicate variations in the pronunciation of vowels and of consonants,
and differentiations in tones. Since most single syllables function
as meaningful words identified only by tone, and each of these phonetic
syllables can have numerous meanings, the diacritical marks are an essential
part of the new written system.
French
Influences
Under
French rule, the French language was widely used in the cities, and it
was read and spoken by all secondary-school graduates. Many less
educated people, including merchants, lowranking civil servants, army veterans,
and domestics working for French households, also had some familiarity
with the language, although their knowledge might be limited to a form
of pidgin French. In the rural areas the language generally was less
well known, but a number of minority peoples learned its rudiments in school
or during service with the French army. Use of the French language
resulted in minor changes in the grammatical structure of Vietnamese and
in the addition of some new technical, scientific, and popular terms.
Literacy:
definition:
age 15 and over can read and write
total
population: 93.7%
male:
96.5%
female:
91.2% (1995 est.)
Links
for More Information
Sources:
Central
Intelligence Agency
Vietnam:
A Country Study
Consular
Information Sheet |
