Sino-Vietnamese grammatical vocabulary and sociolinguistic conditions for borrowing

Abstract

Vietnamese has been demonstrated to be a Mon-Khmer Austroasiatic language (Haudricourt 1954, Shorto 2006), albeit one which differs substantially from the typical Austroasiatic phonological template (Alves 2001). Some of that linguistic transformation was most likely due in part to language contact with Chinese, primarily through the massive lexical borrowing that took place over the past two millennia. However, the question of the sociolinguistic conditions under which this borrowing occurred over this large period of time has nevertheless been little described. The main purpose of this paper is to consider the borrowing of grammatical vocabulary in particular from Chinese into Vietnamese to exemplify the long-term Sino-Vietnamese language contact. This requires an exploration of the socio-historical context in which the elements of Chinese came into Vietnamese and a sorting out of the spoken versus literary means of transmission of linguistic borrowing. This case study in the borrowing of grammatical vocabulary sheds light on the issues of language contact and linguistic borrowing when a prestigious written language is accessible to a linguistic community.