ABSTRACT
The language described here, known to its native speakers as tiếng Việt-nam or simply tiếng Việt (literary appellations: Việt-va˘n or Việt-ngữ) is used in daily communication over the whole territory of Vietnam, formerly known as Annam (whence the older name for the language, Annamese or Annamite). It is the mother tongue of the ethnic majority called người Việt or người Kinh – some 66 million inhabitants who live in the delta lowlands of Vietnam, plus over one million overseas Vietnamese, in France, the USA, Canada, Australia, etc. Other ethnic groups (Chinese, Cambodians, Indians and the highlanders called ‘Montagnards’) know Vietnamese and can use it in their contacts with the Vietnamese. Although Chinese characters were used in literary texts, in which Chinese loanwords
also abound (on account of ten centuries of Chinese political domination), Vietnamese is not at all genetically related to Chinese. It belongs rather to the Mon-Khmer stock, within the Austro-Asiatic family, which comprises several major language groups spoken in a wide area running from Chota Nagpur eastward to Indochina. In comparing Vietnamese and Mường, a language spoken in the highlands of northern
and central Vietnam and considered an archaic form of Vietnamese, the French scholar Jean Przyluski maintained that ancient Vietnamese was at least closely related to the Mon-Khmer group of languages, which have no tones but several prefixes and infixes. Another French linguist, Henri Maspéro, was more inclined to include Vietnamese in the Tai family, whose members are all tonal languages. According to Maspéro, modern Vietnamese seems to result from a mixture of many elements, precisely because it has been successively, at different times in its history, at the northern limit of the MonKhmer languages, the eastern limit of the Tai languages and the southern boundary of Chinese. More recently, however, the French botanist-linguist A.-G. Haudricourt pointed out the origin of Vietnamese tones, arguing lucidly in his 1954 article that Vietnamese, a member of the Mon-Khmer phylum, had, as a non-tonal language at the beginning of
the and that by century it had acquired all six tones which characterise it today. This explanation of Vietnamese tonogenesis has thus helped us to point conclusively to the true genetic relationship of Vietnamese: its kinship to Mường, the sister language, with which it forms the Vietnamese-Mường group within the Mon-Khmer phylum. Up to the late nineteenth century, traditional Vietnamese society comprised the four
classes of scholars, farmers, craftsmen and merchants. The French colonial administration, which lasted until 1945, created a small bourgeoisie of functionaries, merchants, physicians, lawyers, importers and exporters, etc., within and around the major urban centres. The language of the class of rural workers retains dialect peculiarities, in both grammar and vocabulary, whereas the language of the city dwellers accepts a large number of loanwords from Chinese and from French, the latter having been the official language for more than eighty years. Since 1945, Vietnamese has replaced French as the medium of instruction in all schools of the land. The history of Vietnamese has been sketched by Maspéro as follows:
(1) Pre-Vietnamese, common to Vietnamese and Mường before their separation; (2) Proto-Vietnamese, before the formation of Sino-Vietnamese; (3) Archaic Vietnamese, characterised by the individualisation of Sino-Vietnamese
(towards the tenth century); (4) Ancient Vietnamese, represented by the Chinese-Vietnamese glossary Hua-yi Yi-yu
(sixteenth century); (5) Middle Vietnamese of the Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin dictionary of Alexandre
de Rhodes (seventeenth century); and (6) Modern Vietnamese, beginning in the nineteenth century.
