Lecture 1:              INTRODUCTION

                                  What is dialect and why study it?

                                  How we should study Vietnamese Dialects?

                                  Historical and sociolinguistic development of Vietnamese language

                                  Geographical distribution of Vietnamese dialects

WHAT IS DIALECT?

Dialectology, obviously, is the study of dialect and dialects. But what exactly is a dialect? In common usage, of course, a dialect is a substandard, low-status, often rustic form of language, generally associated with the peasantry, the working class, or other groups lacking in prestige. Dialect is also a term which is often applied to forms of language, particularly those spoken in more isolated parts of the world, which have no written form. And dialects are also often regarded as some kind of (often erroneous) deviation from a norm – as aberrations of a correct or standard form of language.

Here we shall not be adopting any of these points of view.

When the population increases, leading to extend the living area, tribes live far each other, and no contact with each other anymore. Language is always evolving, constantly changing. However, geographical distance makes linguistic changes in zone A not accessible to zone B and vice versa. It makes the differences in communication rules, languages between tribes become different from the original language, create many different dialects. For this reason, any variety of a language characterized by systematic differences in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary from other varieties of the same language is called a dialect.

Virtually every language in the world has dialects—varieties of the language that are particular to a group of speakers. Dialects vary by region and by social group. Dialect diversity, or language variation, reflects the fact that languages change over time and that people who live in the same area or maintain the same social identity share language norms; in other words, they speak the same dialect.

Although many people believe that the variety of language they and the people around them speak is not a dialect, in reality, everyone speaks a dialect, since dialects are simply varieties of the same language. Many people also believe that there is only one correct form of a language, but in truth, no dialect is superior to another on linguistic grounds. All dialects are systematic language varieties that follow regular patterns of vocabulary choice, grammar, and pronunciation.

WHY STUDY IT?

This course aims to learn more about the variety of Vietnamese in different areas. Learning Vietnamese dialects help us not only to study Vietnamese but also to know more about the people and culture of the S-shape country.

To understand

There is a considerable difference among Vietnamese dialects. Due to cultural diversity, Vietnamese language in each area has its own color. You may think if you learn Vietnamese well, you can easily understand everything Vietnamese people say. Unfortunately, even some native speakers can’t even understand each other. This happens when they come from different areas of country.

Culture

Knowing a language is equivalent to knowing a culture. By learning dialects, you can learn the culture of a local region, and that is equal to know people and history!

To be open...

Human psychology has always been wary or at least reserved with people who come from another local. But imagine if you can only understand but also speak the same local language as them. It is the harmony in communication that will help you get more open from them. And it is also an art in communication.

Interaction

Who to interact with? Many people. Your grandparents, relatives, or even your parents? Some people's grandparents, especially those of our generations, only know how to speak dialect and not other languages and by knowing dialects, you can interact more with them and won't that be interesting?

There is no discrimination here but respect for cultural diversity

With dialects, every language is connected to the concrete place, concrete people, concrete life. Like every plant, every animal, every rock, every water, every cloud lives only as a concrete being, dialects absorb the living substrate and that makes them unique in the universe. Dialects produce new words, with any contact with another language or reality (technology, nature …) they absorb it in a creative way. The most important thing is that dialects use all the phonetical potential of the language and they are a laboratory for the abstract system of language. They also break automatisms of any language – the effort to understand a dialect is the effort to understand the differences in any community.

A language will die if it is no longer spoken

See, there are hundreds and thousands of dialects in the world and a lot of them don’t even have a writing system. So the only thing that keeps the language alive is to speak it. If someday people speak the language less and less often, eventually it’s going disappear. Dialects play a huge role in local culture so if you don’t want them to disappear, the only way is to speak it more.

HOW WE SHOULD APPROACH THE STUDY OF DIALECTS?

The study of dialects offers a fascinating approach to learning about language. Ideally, by learning about how language varies geographically and socially, we will come to understand at least two basic facts about language: 1) that language changes over time, and 2) that language use is linked to social identity.

Language variation, or dialect diversity, reflects the fact that languages change over time and that people who live in the same geographical area or maintain the same social identity share language norms; in other words, they speak the same dialect. Although dialects differ geographically and socially, no dialect is better structurally than another. While many people believe there to be only one correct form of a language, what is standard actually varies from dialect to dialect.  Judging someone's pronunciation (or grammar or word choice) as wrong may lead to unwarranted judgments about their intelligence or ability.

Dialect discrimination is widely tolerated in Vietnam. If people had a better understanding of how language works, they would probably be less inclined to make negative judgments about speakers of different dialects. Knowledge about how language works is fundamental to understanding human communication in the same way that a knowledge of biology leads to a better understanding of how the human body works. While popular views are not always inaccurate, they may need to be re-examined. Debate about what is "correct" can become a moral battlefield in which individuals argue the merits of language use and language instruction according to absolute standards of right and wrong.

In any case, you’re going to want to get talking to native speakers as much as you can but remember that native speakers aren’t always reliable witnesses. The extent of the differences between dialects can become exaggerated in their imaginations because they are not used to using the language with people from other parts of the country. Their subjective beliefs are themselves an important element of the picture, of course, but they could probably often make themselves understood from context or by paraphrasing if they really had to.

(Source: https://www.ericdigests.org/2002-2/dialects.htm )

HISTORICAL AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC DEVELOPMENT OF VIETNAMESE LANGUAGE

General

Vietnamese is used in daily communication over the whole territory of Vietnam, formerly known as the Empire of Annam (whose language was known as "Annamese" or "Annamite"), It is the mother tongue and the home language of the ethnic majority: the ninety-seven million inhabitants who occupy mainly the delta lowlands of the S-shaped country.

Affinity with Chinese

Vietnam was ruled by China for ten centuries, from 111 B.C. to A.D. 939: hence many Chinese loanwords have entered the Vietnamese scholarly, scientific and technical vocabulary. Indeed, until the early decades of the twentieth century, Chinese characters were used in the local system of education (with Confucian classics being the prescribed books for the grueling literary examinations that used to open the door to officialdom), and the Chinese script served at the same time as the medium of written communication among the educated people (like Latin in medieval Europe) and the vehicle of literary creations either in verse or in prose. This predominant role of written Chinese in traditional Vietnam has often led to the hasty statement that Vietnamese is “derived from Chinese” or is “a dialect of Chinese”. This is not true: Vietnam was merely under the cultural influence of China, just as Japan and Korea also owe several features of their culture to Sinitic culture. In fact, like Japanese and Korean, Vietnamese is not genetically related to Chinese.

Genetic Relationship

Vietnamese belongs instead to the Mon-Khmer stock—that comprises Mon, spoken in Burma, and Khmer (Cambodian), which is the language of Kampuchea, as well as several minority languages (Khmu, Bahnar, Bru, etc.) of Vietnam—within a large linguistic family called the Austro-Asiatic family. The latter, first mentioned by W. Schmidt, includes several major language groups spoken in a wide area running from the Chota Nagpur plateau region of India in the west to the Indochinese peninsula in the east.

In 1954 was André Haudricourt, a French botanist-linguist, able to trace the origin of the Vietnamese tones, arguing that, as a non-tonal language in the Mon-Khmer phylum at the beginning of the Christian era, Vietnamese had developed three tones by the sixth century, and that by the twelfth century it had acquired all the six tones of modern Vietnamese, all this at the cost of losing final consonants /-? , -h/. This explanation about "tonogenesis" has thus enabled specialists to state fairly safely the genetic relationship of the Vietnamese language: together with Mường, the language of Vietnam forms the Việt-Mường group within the Mon-Khmer phylum of the Austro-Asiatic family.

History of the Language

The history of Vietnamese was sketched by Maspero in his important 1912 article. He distinguished six stages:

1. Pre-Vietnamese, common to Vietnamese and Muòng prior to their separation;
2. Proto-Vietnamese, before the formation of Sino-Vietnamese;

3. Archaic Vietnamese, characterized by the individualization of SinoVietnamese (tenth century);

4. Ancient Vietnamese, represented by the Chinese-Vietnamese glossary Hua-yi Yi-yu (fifteenth century);
5. Middle Vietnamese, reflected in the Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin dictionary by Alexandre de Rhodes (seventeenth century); and

6. Modern Vietnamese, beginning in the nineteenth century.

Nguyễn Đình Hòa (1997), Vietnamese – Tiếng Việt không son phấn, John Benjamins Publishing,
Amsterdam/Philadelphia

GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF VIETNAMESE DIALECTS
It is known that a dialect is a form of the language spoken in different regions of the country. These dialects may have distinctions of words, grammar, and pronunciation modalities. Vietnamese is the language that has many dialects.

The division of the Vietnamese dialects has been done by Vietnamese linguists with some different opinions. Nevertheless, the majority of linguists think that Vietnamese can be divided into three main dialects: northern dialect corresponding to Tonkin, central dialect corresponding to areas from Thanh Hoa province to Hai Van pass, southern dialect corresponding to areas from Hai Van pass to southern provinces. In any case, this division is only relative because the geographical boundaries to divide the dialects are not completely clear. In fact, for the same regions, dialect can vary from a village to another. For three principal dialects above, in addition to the significant differences in vocabulary, it makes the listener easily perceive, distinguish between the dialects that is pronunciation modality.

Phonetics of three main dialects differs significantly. For Vietnamese tone system, northern dialect has full six tones including mid-level tone (thanh ngang), low-falling tone (thanh huyền), low-falling rising tone (thanh hỏi), high-rising tone (thanh sắc), high-rising broken tone (thanh ngã") and low-falling broken tone (thanh nặng), while central and south dialect has only five tones. For Thanh Hoa, Quang Binh, Quang Tri, Thua Thien voices and southern voice in general, there is no distinction between low-falling rising tone and high-rising broken tone. For Nghe An and Ha Tinh voices, broken tone and heavy tone are the same. In terms of prosody, three main dialects are entirely different.