Language

[KevMinh]

How has the Vietnamese language changed in the US over the past 30 years? Are people comfortable using Vietnamese and English together? Is the type of Vietnamese that Vietnamese-Americans use unique compared to other Vietnamese communities around the world?

[nguyenivy]

praise you, KevMinh, for being the first to ask anything in this forum! heh. moving on:

though i have no actual linguistic data to back the following information up, i live in an extremely large vietnamese community and would like to try to answer your question based on my own experience.

it's almost a natural given that generation 1.5 and beyond is much less fluent in vietnamese than in english, including myself. we, for the most part, can get by on the most basic of words-- concrete objects, thoughts, verbs, and simple adjectives indicating color, number, style, and other features-- but often find ourselves "bi/", or in a bind, when we have to use more descriptive language in conversation. when that happens, we simply replace that word with english. take, for example, the question "do you want to eat that?" which would translate to "chi co muon an mon do khong?". in a world where equality is a must, titles like "chi" (sister) and "anh"(brother) which are used to addressed others in respect aren't used so much with friends. it's more like this: "you co muon an french fries khong?"

in writing, we have the time to check over our mistakes and look up more words in teh dictionary, so, given effort, that form of communication is as "xua^/t sa(/c", or efficient, as a vietnam-born vietnamese.

using a (hopefully) more helpful analogy, our vietnamese proficiency equals our parents' english proficiency-- we can usually get by, but sometimes just barely.

for the more proficient speakers, you can still tell that they are an american, or at least viet kieu (foreign vietnamese) by either abrupt changes in dialect (it's most commonly accepted that proper vietnamese is sounds most like the Hanoi dialect, while the Hue dialect is more heavy on accents, and the Sai Gon dialect is spoken with a more relaxed tongue), or careful pronunciation. but hey, we learn vietnamese from our schools, which teach the standard pronunciation-- any other accent or dialect is picked up from home.

oddly enough, and as demonstrated above, my vietnamese friends and i often switch to vietnamese mid sentence or thought, if we are unable to find the appropriate words to express what we're trying to convey.

conversely, i am even more amazed to find my parents and elders actually switching to English midsentence during a conversation, when they tell us that we should be more proficient in vietnamese.
for example, my mother was talking about how her sister in law back in vietnam is now in the process of being interviewed by the government, so she can apply for a visa in order to travel to the united states. in vietnamese, that would translate to "mo noi la mo moi di toi toa phong van de xin the visa va mua ve may bay di hai truyen, toi my va tro ve luon". what my mother said, however, was "mo noi la moi di interview, va xin visa de moi mua round trip ticket toi my." and she laughs when i do that. =P

amazingly, my relatives in vietnam (mostly those in Sai Gon) are able to understand my crazy American-Vietnamese jargon, riddled with mistakes and English words, but hardly the neighbor's niece from Spain. is it because english is more of an international language and is more widely accepted in vietnam than spanish? i think so, because her vietnamese wasn't nearly as atrocious as mine.

due to growing commercial and international influence, vietnam as its own country is adopting new words from english, often interchanging those words with the vietnamese translation, or just using only that word, altogether. take,for example, the computer, which translates to "may tinh", but is most often called "may computer". the moped, a common form of transportation, is called a "hong da", which is actually a vietnamese corruption of the word Honda, the company that used to make the majority of those vehicles.

in other words, Vietnamese throughout the years is still the same language-- this recent branching is only the result of the great diaspora. is the vietnamese language slowly dying, then? not exactly dying, but dissolving, in the traditional sense. on an international level, however, it's only part of an ever-diversifying world.

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