ABSTRACT
The genetic affi liation of Vietnamese has been the subject of some controversy. For long, it was regarded as a member of the Sino-Tibetan family, and, certainly, there is a very substantial Chinese lexical element in the language, which is hardly surprising, given the decisive infl uence of Chinese language and culture on Vietnam over some 2,000 years. Research in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, has gone to suggest that this Chinese element is superimposed on a non-Sino-Tibetan substratum. What is controversial is the exact nature of the substratum. According to H. Maspéro (1912, 1916) Modern Vietnamese represented the fusion of a Mon-Khmer language with a Tai language; and, in view of the tonal structure of Vietnamese, the tonal Tai language was taken to be the decisive formant. Accordingly, Vietnamese was for some time classifi ed as a Tai language. In the 1950s, however, A.G. Haudricourt showed that Vietnamese did not acquire its tonal system till comparatively late in its history (probably during the fi rst millennium AD) and that it was basically a Mon-Khmer language, belonging to the Austro-Asiatic phylum. This is now the accepted classifi cation. Probably at least 70 million people speak the language in Vietnam, and at least another million speakers are scattered abroad, with large colonies in the USA, in Hong-Kong, Paris and several Pacifi c islands. These numbers place the language easily in the world’s top twenty.
