If I had a research grant to conduct a linguistic study, on Vietnamese, I think I would try to investigate the derivation in the spoken Vietnamese language – dialect. As far as I know, there are three primary dialects in Vietnamese:
- The Bắc (northern) dialect that is spoken primarily in the Northeast region, the Northwest region, and the Red River Delta region.
- The Huế (central) dialect that is spoken primarily in the North Central Coast and South Central Coast region
- The Nam / Saigon (southern) dialect that is spoken primarily in the regions south of the South Central Coast, that is, the Central Highlands, the Southeast region, and the Mekong River delta.
While dialects are not uncommon in the world, the thing that I really want to understand is that after fall of the South Vietnam in 1975, Northern Vietnam quickly unified the country and established a standardized curriculum for education. In addition to that, because the capital is in Hanoi, the Northern dialect forms the basis of the standard language and became the prestige dialect. The thing about the Northern dialect is that it is technically the “correct” dialect and every other dialect speaker are conditioned to understand the Northern dialect. How? Every news network in the country are controlled by the government to impose propaganda and censorship, and so news anchors are almost always Northerners.
I guess my question here is if there is such a big push for the “true” dialect, why do other dialects still exist? All education in Vietnam is supposed to be standardized and styled to present the Northern variation because it is deemed to be the official one, however, the most prominent Vietnamese dialect is not the Northern one but the Southern one.
I wonder if this is due to the difference in political standpoint that still exists in Vietnam today. Southern Vietnam, especially Ho Chi Minh city (Saigon) is still very liberal and open to western influence. On the other hand, Northern Vietnam, especially Hanoi, is very conservative and promotes traditionalism and nationalistic views while condemning outside influences – at one point, a former government official proposed a move to disposed of the current orthographic practice (the Latin script) and move back to the traditional, logographic writing system, Chữ Nôm, in order to ‘preserve’ cultural identity.
It is obvious that there is still tension between the Northern and Southern Vietnam in terms of political standpoint and that, in turn, could create the drift between the manner of speech of the two regions. This theory, I realized, however, does not really explain the Huế dialect that is also prominent in the country. So as a researcher, I want to research the factors that could have contributed to this divide.
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