#also i am not russian!!! it's just my native language as a second gen immigrant with ukrainian parents

[viridianstars]

idk if this is an unpopular opinion, but i've had to endure so much terrible german and russian in movies and tv shows that i'm lowkey glad the french are getting a taste of what that's like with sam's french

[bodhisatta]

First generation Vietnamese immigrants are like time machines that hold knowledge of Vietnamese culture up to a certain point without ever updating their databases.

Second generation immigrants like me only hold a part of the culture as we have never seen or experienced it on Vietnamese soil. We wonder what it was like to be Vietnamese then. We wonder what it's like to be Vietnamese now. Whether we're 1st gen or 2ng gen, we're nearly clueless about how Vietnamese people are raised today, and they are even more clueless about their history.

"Post-75" is a phrase that is often used by my family members. It is used to refer to anything from Vietnam that evolved after 1975, the end of the Vietnam War. There is post-75 music, post-75 currency, post-75 fashion, and post-75 language.

Something I like to say about Vietnamese kids in Vietnam is "I bet they spell ly like li." Ly is the Vietnamese word for cup, and it is often spelled "li" by people who learned post-75 Vietnamese spelling.

To build on the time machine bit I mentioned before, I am a time machine that holds the pre-75 Vietnamese language. My dialect and vocabulary will never change. The language in Vietnam has changed, however. Words are spelled differently, like ly and li. Words are pronounced differently in an evolution of a new dialect constructed and taught by the people who oppressed my family. Viet kids know it as their language, but we know it as a form of silencing.

After the war, people in Vietnam were not to show the striped flag. It's a symbol of resistance to oppressors. They were to adopt the political views of the north. They were to speak like northerners. Viet people were to either flee the country or succumb to their rule, abandoning southern Vietnamese culture.

It became more than speaking "like northerners". "Pre-75" and "post-75" aren't just synonyms of "souththern-like" and "northern-like". If we hear some northern Viet people speaking here in the U.S., they could be refered to as "pre-75". So what is "post-75" when referring to northern Vietnamese?

North Vietnam is pretty close to China. Like right next to it. It's only natural that Chinese people immigrate to north Vietnam, but after the Vietnam war, the case was different. China and north Vietnam fought together during the Vietnam War, and since the north won, Chinese influence began to spread, and the Viet language was affected especially in the north.

I said that "hearing northern Viet people speak is like hearing a British person speak", and this was brought to another level after the war. The post-75 northern accent is often indiscernable even to my fluent parents. Sometimes, my parents can't tell if people are speaking Chinese or Vietnamese in a Facebook video. Why can't we even tell Viet people apart from Chinese people? (All Asians look the same joke here)

In addition to the obviously new sound, two other suggestions were recently made to change the dynamics of the Vietnamese language: 1) Change how words are spelled in a major reform. 2) Teach Chinese in schools from a young age.

1) One retired professor had a galaxy brain idea to change consonants in the Vietnamese language to simplify them since they had the same pronunciation. Think like the letter S in silicone and C in cerulean. They make the same sound, so why not change words with that C in it to have the letter S instead? Serulean?

Well, his idea to do this in Vietnamese wouldn't work since the letters he said were pronounced the same were actually different, and native Vietnamese speakers would know this. Pre-75 Vietnamese speakers learned these differences first, so there wouldn't be any confusion. Is spoken Vietnamese taught differently post-75 in a way that makes some sounds obselete?

It's pretty skeevy that the proposed writing system makes Viet words look more like pinyin, romanized Chinese. Our current latin alphabet came from French colonization, and it's pretty new. Even my Grandmother remembers using Chu Nom, the writing system that came from Chinese imperialism, before using the latin alphabet. Why are we going back to Chinese influence? Is this a way of evolving post-75 language to be even less Vietnamese?

Someone on the internet also spotted out that in the new proposed writing system, the word for "difficulty" would turn into the spelling for "dick". Alright.

2) Teaching Chinese (probably Mandarin) in school. My parents told me that they were required to learn either Chinese, Russian, French, Japanese, or English in their time. Some of these have obvious reasons. France and Japan occupied our land. Russia was Communist. China is our neighbor, they controlled Vietnam for 1000 years, is communist, and supported the north in the war, so they had to be an option. English is obvious.

I understand the reasons for having all those languages required at the time. The requirement is no longer needed nowadays, and these nations are not controlling us anymore, but having Chinese and only Chinese required now is, again, skeevy. The spoken dialect in the north already changed so drastically to sound less Vietnamese and more Chinese.

How far is the government willing to change the Vietnamese language now? We've lost so much of our culture after being imperialized that this isn't a "wahh immigrants stealing our jobs and speaking their language instead of mine :((" sort of thing. It's a matter of us, ourselves, having our own language altered and eradicated after being beat down by our oppressors in the present day.