The Role of English in Vietnam’s Foreign Language Policy: A Brief History
Do Huy THINH, Vietnamese TESOL Association
BACKGROUND
The history of Vietnam, as Branigin (1994) puts it, is “a saga of recurrent strife, turmoil, invasion, occupation and hardship” (p. A22). For a long time, Vietnam did not have its own language. Foreign interventions and the subsequent use of foreign languages as the national or official language overwhelmed most of the nation’s 4000-year history. The Vietnamese not only longed and fought to find a language for themselves, but also knew how to adorn and use those foreign languages for national development. Particularly in the twentieth century, the nearly simultaneous, direct involvements in Vietnam of such powers as China, France, Japan, the Soviet Union and the United States exerted various profound influences on language attitudes, language change, and language choice and use. These influences indeed helped shape Vietnam’s foreign language education policy.