The ethnic Vietnamese are concentrated largely in
the alluvial deltas and in the coastal plains, having little in common with the
minority peoples of the highlands, whom they historically have regarded as
hostile and barbaric. A homogenous social group, the Vietnamese exert influence
on national life through their control of political and economic affair s
and their role as purveyors of the dominant culture. By contrast, the ethnic
minorities, except for the Hoa, are found mostly in the highlands that cover
two-thirds of the national territory. The Hoa, the largest minority, are mainly
lowlanders. Officially, the ethnic minorities are referred to as national
minorities.Vietnamese
The origins of the Vietnamese are generally
traced to the inhabitants of the Red River Delta between 500 and 200 B.C.,
people who were a mixture of Australoid, Austronesian, and Mongoloid stock. Like
their contemporary descendants, they were largely villagers, skilled in rice
cultivation and fishing.
Contemporary ethnic Vietnamese live in urban as
well as rural areas, are engaged in a variety of occupations, and are
represented at all levels on the socioeconomic scale. The power elite (senior
officials in the party, government, and military establishments), in particular,
is dominated by ethnic Vietnamese. Although predominantly Buddhist, the
Vietnamese people's religious beliefs and practices nevertheless include
remnants of an earlier animistic faith. A sizable minority is Roman Catholic.
Despite some regional and local differences in customs and speech, the people
retain a strong sense of ethnic identity that rests on a common language and a
shared cultural heritage.
Vietnamese, the official language, is the mother
tongue of the vast majority of the people and is understood by many national
minority members. According to a widely accepted theory, Vietnamese is believed
to be related to the Austroasiatic family of languages, which includes various
languages, dialects, and subdialects spoken in mainland Southeast Asia from
Burma to Vietnam. Scholarship nonetheless is tentative on whether Vietnamese,
which was spoken in the Red River Delta long before the Christian era, was
influenced by Mon-Khmer or Tai, both Austroasiatic subsets.
Actually, the Vietnamese language was influenced
more by classical Chinese than by any other language. During more than 1,000
years of Chinese rule and for centuries afterwards, Chinese was the language of
officialdom, scholarship, and literature. The Chinese language had special
status because of its identification with the ruling class of scholar-officials.
Nevertheless, Vietnamese continued to be the popular language, even though
knowledge of Chinese was a prerequisite to government employment and social
advancement.
Beginning in the eighth or ninth century, the
Vietnamese devised a popular script based on Chinese characters to express
written ideas and to standardize the phonetics of their own language. Well
developed by the thirteenth century, this system, which combined ideographs and
phonetics, became the medium for a growing popular literature. The system is
known as chu nom, literally "southern character" or "southern writing," or
simply nom. Although disdained by orthodox Confucian scholars, chu nom had a
distinct place in the evolution of Vietnam's vernacular literature through the
end of the nineteenth century.
In the seventeenth century, the Vietnamese
language evolved further when Portuguese and French missionaries developed a new
transcription that used roman letters instead of Chinese characters. The new
system, called quoc ngu, was devised as a tool for their missionary activities,
including the translation of prayer books and catechisms. By the end of the
nineteenth century, it had become the common method of writing, gradually
replacing classical Chinese and chu nom. quoc ngu uses diacritical marks above
or below letters to indicate variations in the pronunciation of vowels and of
consonants, and differentiations in tones. Since most single syllables function
as meaningful words identified only by tone, and each of these phonetic
syllables can have numerous meanings, the diacritical marks are an essential
part of the new written system.
Under French rule, the French language was widely
used in the cities, and it was read and spoken by all secondary-school
graduates. Many less educated people, including merchants, lowranking civil
servants, army veterans, and domestics working for French households, also had
some familiarity with the language, although their knowledge might be limited to
a form of pidgin French. In the rural areas the language generally was less
wellknown , but a number of minority peoples learned its rudiments in school or
during service with the French army. Use of the French language resulted in
minor changes in the grammatical structure of Vietnamese and in the addition of
some new technical, scientific, and popular terms. |
