Vietnamese. A monosyllabic language made up of twenty-nine letters and six tonal accent marks. One would think that this language would be rather simple to learn and even simpler to understand, but like all other languages, Vietnamese can be difficult even for native speakers. The complexity of it lies in the proper syntax of words, the combination of phrases and even the correct use of a single term to present the most accurate meaning.
The Vietnamese language is thousands of years old, while the current Quoc Ngu writing system is centuries old. The preservation of this language has been incredible, but the Vietnamese we speak today is not the same as the Vietnamese of 1000 years ago, or even 100 years ago. The language is constantly altered within Vietnam. Anyone who travels to Vietnam will notice the small differences in dialects from the southern to northern regions and everywhere in between. When you add migration and immigration to the equation, it is inevitable that the language will take on a different appearance.
The differences between dialects can be as small as the term for spoon. Just consider all your Vietnamese acquaintances. The way they talk will give a small window into the dialects of Vietnamese that they have been exposed to or grown up with. Retention of language is a rather difficult task regardless of location or ethnicity. Even in the regions of a language’s origins, retention is a perpetually arduous task. A language in use will continuously be altered, recreated and reformulated with the coming and goings of generations. How the language is used plays a large part in how the language is retained. In a sense, the original language is being lost, but at the same time our language is evolving. How do you perceive the situation?
Correction: A previous edition of this post stated that the Vietnamese language is over 150 years old. More accurately, the Vietnamese language itself is millenniums old and the writing system is centuries old.
The Vietnamese language itself is not 150 years old but rather over 4000 years old. Only the Latin-based Vietnamese writing is recent. Vietnamese had been using Kanji for thousands of years and we used Chữ Nôm, a modified Kanji combination of the sorts started sometimes in 14-15th century. Until the Latin introduction by Alexander de Rhodes (a Jesuit) we all know as Quốc Ngữ nowadays.
I really hope Nhi To had something else in mind when writing this article. The title is irrelevant to the content, which is, of course, very vague and contradictory. Please provide adequate sources of how this paper came about because I don’t believe enough research has been done regarding this very interesting subject.
As Dat Nguyen pointed out, the Vietnamese language is as old as any text can document; it was with us, the Vietnamese, before the first Chinese invasion. As with any language, words are “borrowed” from other languages from neighboring countries (a form of “evolution” not “lost” of). In our case, we “exchange” words with Tay, Thai, Muong, Ma Lai, Chiem, et cetera.
Some of us have wrongly perceived that we speak the Chinese language because Chu Nom is similar to what the Chinese had used. This is wrong! We never speak nor write Chinese! Though having the same root but Chu Nom is far more complex. The reason I throw this in here is because you might stumble on an article somewhere on the net saying so and have the wrong approach in your research.
This subject is very interesting but extremely difficult to work on. Not recommended for the faint of hearts.
Marshal McLuhan wrote intensely about how the alphabet deeply changed European societies, I wonder if anyone has written about how that impacted Vietnamese society.
Only 11 people in the world really know how to read Chu Nom (maybe less today).
I heard the Uni of Social Sciences and Humanities was still teaching Chu Nom in the 90s? If that’s true, I hope there are more people with knowledge of it.
Interesting topic but I didn’t catch anything about “Evolution or Loss of Language”…