Linguistics Presentation: Vietnamese Beemy Nguyen May 4, 2015 WLC 212 MW 4-5:50pm

Background Language: Vietnamese is the official language of Viet Nam. Number of speakers: 66 million people in Viet Nam & 2 million people across the world (ALSIntl) Where it is Spoken: Australia, Cambodia, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, Laos, Netherlands, New Caledonia, Norway, Philippines, Senegal, Thailand, United Kingdom, USA, and Vanuatu. Dialects: Northern (Hanoi), Central (Hue), & Southern (formerly Saigon now Ho Chi Minh City). Trung Nam

Alphabet - Orthography Similarities Uses Roman, phonetic alphabet Consists of consonants, consonant clusters, final consonants, and vowels. Uses punctuation symbols Differences The letters “f”, “j”, “w”, and “z” are not a part of the Vietnamese alphabet. 11 simple vowels, 19-21 consonants depedning on dialect. Different sentence structure. No suffix to indicate plurals. No prefixes to show tense.

“If you change the tone of a word, you change the meaning of it too!” Phonology “If you change the tone of a word, you change the meaning of it too!” Vietnamese is a tonal language and uses diacritical marks to help with pronunciation. variations in pitch, length, contour, intensity and degree of vocal cord constriction. There are six tones in Vietnamese. Their pronunciation varies from dialect to dialect.

Diacritical marks are symbols added to letters of the alphabet to indicate different pronunciation than the letters are usually given.

Other Markers Gender and age are important when addressing others and referring to yourself. This depends on the age of your grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, child, niece, or nephew, and how old the person to whom you are speaking with. Word Order: Subject then Verb then Object. Does not have adjectives shortcuts that end with -ly or -ish to describe an object being like another. Nouns: Uses classifiers to indicate what class a noun belongs to (examples are animate objects, inanimate objects, sharp objects, buildings, flat objects, animals, etc) then the number, gender or case of the noun (Thompson).

Idioms Means cricket or trying to serenade someone in a creepy way. Literally means a type of blue crabs. This somewhat offensive term is used mostly by young men living in the city to call a girl like babe, chick, doll, or sweetie.

Pragmatics The use of the word “right”. Like in English, it could mean right-left or right-wrong depending on the context. “Sorry” has multiple uses as well: an apology, pardoning, sarcasm, and a way to say sorry, i’m not sorry.

Why is it Important to Me? What does it have value in the modern world? Most asian cultures think the more assimilated into the English speaking world, the better you are. So retention of their native language takes a backseat. Vietnamese culture emphasises on learning the language of our people even if you are living in the country. It helps preserve the culture and connects people together from I think its valuable to be able be bilingual, it makes the world not so boring.

Works Cited Lewis, M. Paul, Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). 2015. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Eighteenth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. <http://www.ethnologue.com/>. Thompson, Irene. "Vietnamese ." About World Languages. Ed. Scott Coble. The Technology Development Group, Mar. 2013. Web. 4 May 2015. <http://aboutworldlanguages.com/vietnamese>. "Vietnamese." Accredited Language Services International. Accredited Language Services. Web. 3 May 2015. <http://www.alsintl.com/resources/languages/Vietnamese/>.