Variation in linguistic politeness in Vietnamese: a study of transnational context

Abstract

This work is a revised PhD dissertation comparing Politeness in Vietnamese spoken in Vietnam and Australia, hence the “transnational context”. The study uses naturalistic speech data recorded in everyday public contexts, including shops and markets, where the Vietnamese vernacular. The data corpus for each national context are more than 1000 turns at talk, and was transcribed and analysed in relation to four independent variables: national context, gender, role and generation. Through the data analysis, 21 categories of politeness marker are identified, defined and discussed in conjunction with general linguistic politeness theory concerning the interlocutor's “face wants” and two concepts of politeness in Vietnamese: (1) strategic politeness (lịch sự) and (2) respectful politeness (lễ phép). The main findings emerging from the analysis are that Vietnamese living in Australia are more linguistically polite than those living in Vietnam, using significantly more politeness markers (7 of 10) across 21 categories. Further in-depth exploration reveals how the usage of specific categories of marker is similar and different across the national contexts, and possible explanations for these differences in relation to intercultural contact and socio-political change are presented. Show more