Vietnamese in the Cultural Nation Building of the First Republic of Vietnam (1955-1963)

Abstract

Once lacking a writing system, the Vietnamese language eventually eclipsed literary Chinese and French in official administrative capacities to become the official national language of modern Vietnam. By 1945, the linguistic imagination of Vietnam was not whether Vietnamese (tiếng Việt) and the Romanized “national language script” (chữ Quốc ngữ) should be cemented into the country’s national formation but rather how ideological concerns would shape the construction of Vietnamese language conventions. This thesis argues that language-making for the first administration of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, 1955-1975), commonly referred to as the First Republic of Vietnam (1955-1963), was explicitly part of a larger cultural nation-building agenda aimed at actualizing the regime’s ideological aspirations. I first examine how language was deployed in the making of an all-Vietnamese postcolonial state. Then, I turn to two RVN national universities (in Saigon and Hue) to examine the role of the Vietnamese in the making of a Vietnamese national identity. Finally, I examine a RVN national archives source document that directly addresses how certain foreign loanwords should or should not be standardized in the Vietnamese vernacular, exposing a deference to traditional culture and practices.