Languages, Vol. 9, Pages 377: An Updated Overview of the Austroasiatic Components of Vietnamese

Languages, Vol. 9, Pages 377: An Updated Overview of the Austroasiatic Components of Vietnamese

Languages doi: 10.3390/languages9120377

Authors: Mark Alves

This article presents an updated view of the language history of Vietnamese from its native Austroasiatic roots, including key historical phonological, morphological, and syntactic features and developments; a characterization of its Austroasiatic etyma; and the context of this information in Vietnamese linguistic ethnohistory. It is now possible to make better supported claims and more precise characterizations due to improved understanding of the history of Austroasiatic and Vietic and their reconstructions, the nature and effect of language contact with Chinese, and the process of typological convergence of the ancestral language of Vietnamese. This study shows that, while Vietnamese is not a typologically characteristic Austroasiatic language, the Austroasiatic components of the Vietnamese lexicon and linguistic structure are more prominent than previously supposed.