ABSTRACT
This chapter gives a succinctly diachronic account of language ideology in Vietnam from the inception of a modern Vietnamese nation-state in 1945 to the present in two main sections divided by the historical milestone of đ?ổ mới (‘renovation’), an economic reform policy launched in 1986 marking a transition from a centralized to a socialist-oriented market economy and a change in xenophobic attitudes toward the capitalist camp. Based on a close relationship between language, ideology, and identity, a third section is added to expand on how the acquired knowledge of language ideology renders a substantial understanding of identity construction in post-reform Vietnam. The crux of the matter highlighted in this chapter is while the people of Vietnam are apt to be flexible in dealing with languages other than their own, they show quite consistent ideology of Vietnamese. Such an insight unravels the reason Vietnamese has survived all odds of imperialism and colonialism and presently holds on to its status quo as the language of officialdom and perhaps one of the most stable national languages in Southeast Asia.
