Every syllable in Vietnamese is written separately. It is also mostly a monosyllabic language. There are words that are multisyllable as well where separate words are combined to make one word. For example, mắt (face) trời (sky) meaning sun. Sometimes though, a word can contain a syllable that isn't able to stand on its own. For example, the na in nết na (be well behaved) cannot occur alone. Nết on its own could mean trait. I would probably want to study these syllables with no meaning on its own to figure out its root origin and to see if these syllables actually have an obscure root meaning. I think I would probably start my research by looking up data on Sino-Vietnamese and the old writing script chữ nôm. My theory would be that the words that aren’t monosyllabic and have a syllable that isn't a word on its own are actually borrowed words. If this theory holds true than I would want to see whether the original Vietnamese words (words that weren't borrowed) are more similar to other Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer languages since there's been some debate on whether Vietnamese actually belongs in that group. Additionally, I would want to research from that whether there is one Vietnamese dialect that is closer to original Vietnamese. For example, if there's a dialect that uses less borrowed words and how that came to be. Family language would then obviously appear in my work. Other than that, disciplinary perspectives and phonetic inventory would also occur. Disciplinary perspectives in the sense that I would have to look at multiple disciplines to trace how original Vietnamese developed and phonetic inventory in how dialectal variation closely relates to original Vietnamese.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00437956.1963.11659787
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Hey Mae! That would be a super interesting topic to study. I'm always interested in how languages borrow from each other and the influences that different languages will have on each other. Especially as Vietnam was part of the French colonial empire, I'm sure there's a lot of French influence as well as influence from other neighboring languages.