Why bother learning Vietnamese?
Vietnamese is not a global citizen’s language, someone once said. There’s no business sense in learning it. The words:
Vietnamese is not the spoken language in the world (meaning it is not really a global business language), doesn’t really have a huge art/film scene, and vietnamese [sic] culture in general does not really spark a huge influence across the globe. So why should I learn Vietnamese?
To be sure, I read it in a r/VietNam subreddit post while researching my options for possible Vietnamese language courses I could take as a heritage speaker, and Reddit is definitely the reliable internet source everyone should resort to for queries of this nature.
The author, a self-admitted “Westerner” born of Vietnamese parents and raised in the United States of America, references a cultural phenomenon in which Vietnam’s younger generation appear to take more interest in foreign than domestic media (“hướng ngoại” – looking outward).
OP isn’t wrong. The Americanization of Vietnamese ambition feels real: in things like the lifelong international education pathways parents set their children down, so they may one day vươn mình and “stretch themselves” beyond Vietnam’s borders to a prestigious education abroad and its many attendant benefits.
According to 2024 figures from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Vietnam leads the ASEAN region in volume of students sent abroad for an education, totalling 137,022 students — more than double the figure posted by Indonesia which comes in second.
But what happens when that internationalization comes at the expense of your own native language?
How long does it take to lose a language?
The good news for the 21st century’s Vietnamese-born-and-overseas-educated class of Việt Kiều’s is that the research tends to suggest you never really lose a language you were fluent in – it just decays over time and becomes harder to access with less frequent use.
That picture becomes a little more complicated if — like me — you were a part of the second generation born and raised overseas, and never had a chance to be fluent in your parent’s language in the first place.
In diasporic communities abroad, there’s a widely observed linguistic phenomenon known as the “Three Generational Loss” theory which posits that language is lost by the third generation through assimilation pressures. The first generation (immigrants) maintain the language in the home; the second becomes bilingual; the third loses it.
Many of us end up wandering between cultures, traipsing through the vague tableau of our parent’s memories through the version of the language they preserved when they immigrated, and the generational rift between parent and child grows as you both age. And so the rest of the story goes.
Vietnamese & English: Are they evolving side-by-side, or separately?
In a research piece for the Thu Dau Mot University Journal of Science, Vo Kim Ha discusses the transformation of the Vietnamese language through the following dichotomy:
- “Globalization” as the force which enables the opening up of the international economy via the free movement of goods, services and people across borders;
- “Localization” as the process by which something is made local in character, or restricted to a particular place or region.
In this context, the “forced” historical importation of foreign languages such as Chinese, French and English into Vietnamese was not a static process, but a two-way dynamic in which those influences became “Vietnamized” to suit the local palate. She calls that effortful process of “localization” a key reason why Chinese and French root words continue to live on in harmony and acceptance in the Vietnamese language:
The different transformations due to foreign dominations and the Vietnamese people’s effort result[ed] in a more beautiful language.
But all of this is moot if Vietnamese language education itself is no longer a priority.
She notes in closing that the popularization of English in Vietnam — set to become an official second language for all students by 2035 — is totally contrary to historical efforts to preserve and uphold the beauty and characteristics of the Vietnamese language itself. And then in the same breath, she writes: “However, such change in points of view is necessary and really suitable for modern life and for the era.”
Domestic or foreign pressures: Who drives Vietnamese accent discrimination?
No surprise then, that in the race to compete internationally, “Vietnamization” efforts to evolve the Vietnamese language have largely been left by the wayside in favor of the smoothed, unaccented English which parents believe will guarantee their children’s futures. It’s not enough that you’re proficient in English as a second language — you need to speak it like the foreigners do.
And so English accent discrimination in Vietnam becomes not an assimilation force imposed from the outside, but an internal one driven by domestic pressures to secure your credibility in a world you know is quick to judge. Some parents demand “native English teachers” over non-native speakers for their children and invest all they can into an English-first education which by some standards might appear to invert the norm: English as the first language, Vietnamese as the second.
But from the perspective of an overseas-born Vietnamese returning to learn my parent’s language, there’s something regretful about the prospect of losing your mother tongue in your own home country. If the third-generation diaspora is theory-bound to lose it, let’s hope Vietnam chooses the path which allows Vietnamese and English to evolve side-by-side, rather than one language at the expense of the other.