Genetically modified languages

Okay, so I was eavesdropping. But you really can’t blame me. The two young Vietnamese women sitting at the table behind me were twenty-something, fashionably dressed, presumably unmarried, and apparently employees at a local office. They nattered on loudly, unconcerned by my presence. We were the only people in the room, and after several minutes I gave up my fruitless efforts to read a book as I waited for my dinner, and instead indulged my inner snoop. Truth be told, their conversation was pretty dull: who’d done what to whom at the office, who was getting married, where and what to study, where to go shopping for this and that.

What was remarkable was the amount of English that littered their conversation. It seemed impossible for them to speak more than three sentences without inserting at least one English phrase. “Chị sẫn sàng settle down rồi.” “Cái đó rất là fix.” “Cậu ấy rất passive.” “Cái background của em ấy là gì?” “Chị ấy hơi hơi pessimistic.” “Phải có skill, chứ!” “Có lẽ em sẽ làm freelance.” “Lương của em sẽ performance based.” “Như vậy scale sẽ rất cao.” “Lớp em đang học boring lắm!” “Trường này rất nổi tiếng về teaching method.” “Em chưa give up.” This represents about half the phrases I managed to scribble on my serviette in the ten minutes before my food arrived.

Most of these are words for which there is an easy Vietnamese equivalent. This isn’t the case with an earlier generation of loan words. When I first arrived in Vietnam, I was happy to discover that the vocabulary for car and motorbike parts was largely borrowed from the French language I’d spent a good chunk of my adolescence studying. No surprise there: the Vietnamese language didn’t have much use for the word “bu gi” (spark plug) before the French showed up and brought the damn things with them. But why use pessimistic when you can use bi quan? Why use boring when you can use chán?

Nor is this the sort of use of the English language that causes me so much amusement when my longsuffering Japanese wife uses words she knows as “English” but that have been adapted to particular (and often peculiarly) Japanese usages. “Salaryman” is a well-known example: the words are at their base English but the meaning entirely Japanese. Or to quote a recent conversation with my wife, Arata: “Massa thinks Tomoyuki is cherryboy.” Me: “What’s cherryboy, honey?” Arata: “But it’s an English word.” Me: “Yes and no, honey. Could you explain how Japanese people use it?” Sadly, though, had I engaged in a conversation with the two young women behind me, it would have given rise to no such linguistic follies. “Give up” pretty much means exactly what you think it means, whether it’s used in America or in Vietnam.

Yes, these two young women were making a self-conscious display of their education, their sophistication, and their class. It’s worth noting that we were in a foreign restaurant (Japanese, if you must know), and their use of language was as much a marker of class as their choice of food. So you could just dismiss it as affectation, perhaps combined with an attempt to show off for the foreigner at the next table. But these women are not alone, and in fact they’re not even unusual: they may be at one end of the spectrum, but even at the other end of that spectrum I hear words like “OK” and “funny” creeping their way into common usage. Languages are constantly changing and evolving, I know. But sometimes I can’t help thinking that the speed and the direction of change in the Vietnamese language today makes the process look less like evolution and more like genetic engineering.