I was recently watching some videos of people speaking various south-east Asian languages with subtitles in their own language and it occurred to me that among them all Vietnamese is a strange exception.
In what way? Well it’s the only one that still uses the western (latin) script for writing. All other countries around Vietnam: Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, (and China, of course) all have their own script to write their language in. Vietnam however uses a modified version of the Latin alphabet.
This is strange to me for two reasons:
Firstly, while i am no expert on the subject, it appears to me that this is a clear legacy of colonialism. Secondly, judging by how many modifications the Vietnamese alphabet has, all the various diacritics and tone indicators that are necessary to make it work, this would suggest to me that the Latin alphabet is just not a good fit for the specific phonology and tonal nature of the Vietnamese language.
Wouldn’t it be better for Vietnam to develop its own script (or re-adopt a historical one)? One that is tailor made to fit the Vietnamese language instead of trying to force it into the ill-fitting mold of a western latin alphabet? Should Vietnam not decolonize its language, is what i’m asking, and why didn’t it do so under Ho Chi Minh? Isn’t it time to discard this legacy of colonial imposition and of European cultural domination of Vietnam?
The same goes for other non-European languages (and even some European, particularly the Slavic ones which would probably be better suited to Cyrillic and wouldn’t need to use so many “workarounds” to represent sounds that don’t exist in Latin descended languages) that still use a version of the Latin alphabet despite this script not being a natural fit for the language and only having been adopted due to European colonialism.
Or is this just a really stupid thought i had and nobody really cares? I don’t know, what do you guys think?
Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar all use their own phonetic scripts but the only writing Vietnam had before the French came was a modified form of Chinese characters, and literacy campaigns after the revolution would be more difficult if you had to memorize a character for every word instead of just a letter for each sound. If Vietnam wanted to create its own non-Latin script without using Chinese characters, it would have to adopt another language’s writing system or create a completely new system. The Zhuang language in southern China historically used Chinese characters but it wasn’t a good fit and they’ve been using Latin now since the revolution.
But wasn’t Korea in the same situation at one point? Didn’t they also originally use a modified version of the Chinese script but eventually decided to develop their own alphabet?
And isn’t the argument that the Chinese script is just too difficult to learn and therefore Latin alphabet is better for literacy campaigns a bit eurocentric/orientalist? After all, China had its own literacy campaigns and they were very successful. Their non-phonetic script didn’t seem to be that much of an obstacle to literacy.
Tbf the simplification of the characters was big help in that regard.
Korea also did not develop its script from nothing, they worked with the attempt of a unified script of the Yuan dynasty as a basis and adapted it to their liking. So in a way Vietnam did the same with latin script.
Yes, but the Korean script was created in the 1400s and they had no phonetic script before that while Vietnam already has a phonetic script.
I guess one alternative instead of a return to the cumbersome system of modified Chinese characters would be to look at which South East Asian language is closest phonologically to Vietnamese (Khmer maybe?), then adopt and adapt its script to Vietnamese. If Vietnam were ever to embark on a comprehensive campaign of cultural decolonization i would at least look at such options.
And while we’re on the topic of decolonization, this may be a controversial take but another problematic remnant of colonialism in my opinion is Christianity. Historically Christianity, particularly Catholicism, has been used by the European colonial powers as a subversive element to culturally undermine countries prior to colonization, create traitorous fifth columns (or at least internal strife), and then use the reaction/backlash against missionaries as a pretext for intervention and eventual military takeover.
I still don’t fully understand why formerly colonized countries have not made an effort to expel this alien element from their cultures. If i were East Asian or African i would certainly not want to keep practicing the religion of my former colonial masters.
Woah there, careful now… if you change culture quickly… we might have another cultural revolution on our hands…
Rant on Political Christianity
Honestly, I may be a partisan with this issue, but I honestly would focus my anger modern-day political Protestantism, because it is now dominated by the western rightists in the modern-day…
With political Catholicism, I can see its reactionary imperialist element in Vietnam or even the Philippines, and at its core, the Papal States, but do I need to remind you of the Catholic-Socialist Sandinistas, or Liberation Theology? It doesn’t seem solid that its reactionary at its core…
Maybe if the Roman Church was replaced, the symbolic conservative bond it had would be vanquished…
But for me, Catholicism, to me, is a tool, like Peronism, I can use its image to justify whatever political goals I have in mind… (Maybe this is a weak argument but I have gut feeling against Protestants)
I tend to make a distinction between Christianity in Latin America and Christianity in Africa or East Asia. In the case of Latin America it could be argued that it is not quite as foreign of an element since it was brought over with the settler population. Of course it was still imposed by force on the indigenous peoples, but as the settler and indigenous populations became intermixed to the point that the majority demographic in many of these countries is now what used to be called “mestizo” (i don’t know if that term is still used, please excuse me if it’s outdated), there was sort of a more natural adoption.
In Africa and East Asia on the other hand it was almost exclusively imported through missionaries who were a vanguard of colonialism, and it was done so relatively later than in the Americas.
I’m not talking so much about whether it serves a reactionary or a progressive role in these countries, i think religion has the potential to do both (though in the case of Catholicism arguably tending more to the reactionary side due to institutional links to the Vatican). I’m looking at it from the point of view of colonized peoples reclaiming their original cultural identities. Why should a person living in South East Asia for example feel any connection to a religion that originated in Palestine and which grew into what it is today in the cultural and historical context of Europe and the broader Mediterranean area?
Why should they worship another people’s god? They have an entirely different cultural history that has no connection to this imported religion. The same goes for subsaharan Africa (minus Ethiopia which has a rich history of its own specific branch of Christianity). Why should they pray to the white man’s deity and recite the white man’s scriptures? Why not make an effort to bring back their own traditional religions instead?
I mean, okay, i’m not seriously proposing this as any sort of political programme. There are probably a thousand and one reasons why it would be politically a terrible idea and anyway very low on the list of priorities…but it’s just something i think about every once in a while and so i needed to get this rant off my chest.
Firstly, while i am no expert on the subject, it appears to me that this is a clear legacy of colonialism. Secondly, judging by how many modifications the Vietnamese alphabet has, all the various diacritics and tone indicators that are necessary to make it work, this would suggest to me that the Latin alphabet is just not a good fit for the specific phonology and tonal nature of the Vietnamese language.
This is correct. France’s particular style of colonialism was particularly aggressive about erasing native languages and forcing them to adopt French. Do an image search for a map of Francophone countries and you can see the scar they left across West Africa, for example. In Vietnam, they were starting to use Latin alphabet as an alternative to using Chinese characters before the French came, but the French pushed them towards exclusively using the Latin alphabet as part of their process of converting them to Francophones.
There’s not really a historical writing system to re-adopt - the Chinese character system and its derivatives are just as ‘imported’ as Latin, and I think if you go back earlier than that there’s multiple cultures and ethnic groups and not really a unifying language on the peninsula.
I’m not sure why the Vietnamese haven’t created a new writing system, but I know they’ve considered it multiple times and chose to stick to what they have. Completely switching the writing system is a lot of work. Shifting the infrastructure and education systems and planning a transitional phase where both systems are used is a huge effort on top of everything else the new government had on its plate.
I agree. And if Vietnam for some reason isn’t able to abandon the latin alphabet completely, I hope that Chu Nom and Chu Han can still be coofficial
