ABSTRACT
Speech practice, or interactions in a language, undoubtedly has a strong connection to its people’s culture and history. This is exceptionally true of languages of the peoples who experience impactful culture and language contacts through, for example, colonization, migration, or political practices. Vietnamese is one such language. With an attempt to contribute to the knowledge of Asian languages, and particularly the Vietnamese language, this chapter will discuss major pragmatic features of speech practice in Vietnamese from a pragmatic perspective. The first point of discussion examines linguistic politeness, which will touch upon various linguistic tools that can be used to express politeness: terms of address, honorifics, and forms of requests. The rest of the chapter will examine other popular topics in the pragmatics of speech practice, such as hierarchy versus solidarity, intimacy versus distance, and face protection versus face threatening. In brief, the chapter will present both historical and the most updated research with in-depth explanations of the topics and illustrative examples from empirical studies in the field. Comparisons with other Asian languages will be another important contribution by the chapter to the knowledge of Asian languages.
