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Vietnam Vietnamese
The origins of the Vietnamese are generally traced to the
inhabitants of the Red River Delta between 500 and 200 B.C.,
people who were a mixture of Australoid, Austronesian, and
Mongoloid stock. Like their contemporary descendants, they were
largely villagers, skilled in rice cultivation and fishing
(see Early History
, ch. 1).
Contemporary ethnic Vietnamese live in urban as well as rural
areas, are engaged in a variety of occupations, and are
represented at all levels on the socioeconomic scale. The power
elite (senior officials in the party, government, and military
establishments), in particular, is dominated by ethnic
Vietnamese. Although predominantly Buddhist, the Vietnamese
people's religious beliefs and practices nevertheless include
remnants of an earlier animistic faith. A sizable minority is
Roman Catholic. Despite some regional and local differences in
customs and speech, the people retain a strong sense of ethnic
identity that rests on a common language and a shared cultural
heritage.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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
(see Nine Centuries of Independence
, ch. 1).
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 wellknown , 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.
Data as of December 1987
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