What if, instead of starting with English, French or German, we started our theorising of linguistic contact zones under the pressures of globalisation with Vietnamese? Vietnamese, the language of an imagined community (Anderson, 2006) divided on multiple axes, offers a valuable starting point for considering other languages (including reconsidering global Englishes) as they are invested with the ideological legacies of multiple and conflicting imperial and nationalist histories.

Vietnamese, as a language and set of literate technologies, is marked by a distinctly southern set of historical and contemporary socio-political forces. These include millennia of Chinese influence on language, writing and the functions of the state; French colonial efforts to cultivate a local administrative class; the spectacular revolutionary uptake of national language and literacy campaigns in the struggle for national independence (also resulting in diasporic communities committed to linguistic and political conservatism); and more recent adaptations to the market and standards-based logics of global education. As such, Vietnamese offers a useful vantage point for the development of counter-narratives in the face of a northern story of globalisation that centres the European and North American metropoles and, increasingly, the hegemony of a single language, English. A symbolic instance of the shift in perspective enabled by turning south is in the contrastive denomination of the Vietnamese War as the American War within the Vietnamese vernacular and scholarship (see Chap. 9).

The idea of a southern standpoint that represents a distinctive set of experiences, epistemologies and ontologies has recently been laid out in Raewyn Connell’s Southern Theory (Connell, 2020). However, there are myriad projects that seek to decentre the global north, even from within the traditions of that north—exemplified by Benedict Anderson’s masterful dislocation of the origins of nationalism from Europe to the “new world” (Anderson, 2006). Anderson devotes considerable attention to Vietnam, and to overlapping political entities—such as French Indochina. The parallels he draws with other emerging nationhoods in the south, including neighbouring Indonesia, point to the global relevance of considering the dynamics of the Vietnamese language and literate practices.

The fractious twentieth-century history of Vietnam also invests the terms north and south with their own internal meanings. For sections of Vietnamese diasporic communities in Australia and the USA, language and political identity join together when northern accents and post-1975 linguistic changes continue to index traumatic experiences and entrenched ideological divisions. That is to say, historical and ideological disputes are embedded in notions of Overseas Vietnamese (tiếng Việt hải ngoại) and Domestic Vietnamese (tiếng Việt trong nước) that often map onto a north–south divide. The ideological investments in such north-south distinctions face challenges from other segments of the Vietnamese diaspora, including more recent emigrants (see Chap. 5).

Vietnamese has as strong a claim as any language to a constitution shaped by contact zones, starting with its connection to the sphere of classical Chinese influence through dynasties that ruled through the mandarinate system even after formal independence. This Chinese influence extended from before the Common Era into the second millennium, and in space extended as far as Korea and Japan to the North, predating the dynamics of European colonisation, and post-colonial echoes, that have been of greatest interest to critical linguists in recent times (Alim & Pennycook, 2008; Heller & McElhinny, 2017). Chinese influence is reflected in as much as 60% of the Vietnamese lexicon, in the use of Chinese Sino Nom in civil service admission examinations into the second decade of the twentieth century, and in local scriptural adaptations for vernacular literature (chữ Nôm), with many registers still heavily influenced by Chinese models (see Chaps. 2, 3, and 5 for a detailed discussion).

But it is not just the forms of language that bear the traces of contact, but the social positions accessible through them, and the social evaluations that pass through recognition of registers and other linguistic forms as proper to particular identities and competencies. That is to say, contact is a process that also frames language in the minds of speakers by mobilising metapragmatic regimes (Silverstein, 2003). Metapragmatic regimes, following Silverstein, shape social interactions by providing a sense of what is appropriate, allowable or legitimate speech. Speech and text that is viewed as making excessive use of forms that index Sino-Vietnamese of the past may be negatively evaluated in the metapragmatic order shared by those who live and work in Vietnam, but positively evaluated by some in the diaspora. Schooling is a key location for the establishment and shifting of metapragmatic regimes—illustrated by the attachment to pre-1979 textbooks in Australian heritage Vietnamese language classes (see Chap. 5).

In the early twentieth century, Vietnamese-language schooling was part of the colonial contact zone for a section of the local elite—just enough to populate the lower ranks of the French Indochinese bureaucracy and commercial sectors. The adoption of a new alphabetic script for Vietnamese, Chữ Quốc ngữ, symbolically cut ties with Chinese linguistic and cosmological models. Initially, schooled alongside the children of French colonists and students from other parts of French Indochina, Vietnamese students were subsequently separated from their European peers (Kelly, 1975). Ironically, As Anderson (2006) observes, it was the first generation educated in the colonial schools who, like their classmates in schools across the colonial world, would sow the seeds of nationalist revolt, to be spread through mass literacy campaigns. Commitment to mass education for nation-building was the foundation stone of mid-twentieth-century policy in Vietnam. Externally, this push extended to efforts to establish relations of solidarity with other socialist countries, particularly neighbouring countries where Vietnamese came to be taught as a foreign language.

Schooling has continued to remain a central space for nation-building, including through more recent shifts in the ways that national literature and culture are taught in order to emphasise social change and intercultural understanding (see Chaps. 9 and 10). However, new purposes for education have also gained considerable sway—those that are recognisable in standards and market-driven education reforms, sometimes referred to as the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) (Sahlberg, 2016). Thus standards of proficiency in Vietnamese as a Foreign Language follow the model of the Common European Framework of References for Languages (CEFR) (Division, 2001), a prime example of a globalising standard that is also used in a multitude of non-European settings. Similarly, shifts to notions of competence-based education are evident across various educational sectors in Vietnam, another international trend pushed by transnational policy and testing agencies such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). These trends, together with growth in market-based and private educational sectors that followed the influx of foreign capital, embed locally concepts that emerge from market ideologies, including ideologies that see education in terms of human capital and investment (see Chaps. 3 and 12).

Although English often appears as the only ‘language of internationalisation’, there is a healthy and growing move to internationalisation through the Vietnamese language. Vietnamese language and culture is an established academic field and study is compulsory for foreign students attending Vietnamese universities. Vietnamese is taught in a range of countries, many of which send exchange students to Vietnam. Much of this growth is through Asia-to-Asia academic mobility, a phenomenon largely overlooked in the literature on the internationalisation of higher education (Kim Khanh & Ngoc, 2023; Phan Le et al., 2022). At the level of policy, Vietnam is also distinctive in combining increasingly market-oriented structures within a socialist system of government (Le Ha & Ngoc, 2020).

Something of particular interest is happening in this process of internationalisation, particularly as it involves other countries that fell within the historical linguistic and political sphere of Chinese influence (as a result sharing a wealth of idioms, proverbs, and lexical items). There is a hint that Vietnamese may be treated in some educational settings as a língua franca. That is, a language that is not fixed in a single cultural tradition or pragmatic regime, but open to other cultural and pragmatic perspectives. This is brilliantly laid out in the account of Korean learner experiences of navigating the metapragmatics of making compliments in Vietnamese in Chap. 4. This chapter offers an insight into the dilemmas that all speakers face in managing shifting social and linguistic priorities that concern how we address, compliment, and engage with our interlocutors—drawn into sharp focus in the example of gendered patterns of complimenting appearance. These point to a linguistic micropolitics that locates agency in the discussions that students have about how particular uses of language affect themselves and others, and how shifting a perspective from a rigid adherence to an apparently homogenous cultural norm towards acceptance of divergent pragmatic stances can be valuable in highlighting constraining social structures. In so doing, these structures are put under pressure (“compliment culture is being changed”).

Vietnamese is also a língua franca for 15% of the population within Vietnam, mostly ethnic minority groups for whom both Vietnamese and their own languages are sometimes seen as the source of difficulties. As argued in this volume (Chap. 8), a shift to viewing minority languages as a resource for learning with and through Vietnamese offers a valuable alternative perspective on language. So too does the recognition that language in and of itself does not constitute a problem or a solution, but rather attention must be paid to the economic and educational marginalisation of populations in the Vietnamese northern and central highlands whose access to the fruits of rapid development in urban areas has been limited.

In many settings, language as a problem appears to have faded in favour of language as resource as far as contact with other languages are concerned (to borrow from Ruiz’s conceptual framework (Ruiz, 1984, 2010)). Code-switching, code-meshing and translanguaging characterise the linguistic practices of Vietnamese migrants and subsequent generations across a range of settings in Europe, the USA and Australia, to cite examples discussed in the present volume (see Chaps. 6 and 7). But translanguaging itself, as a concept most influentially framed to meet the needs of Spanish bi-linguals in the USA (García et al., 2017; Windle & Amorim Possas, 2023), also needs to be rethought from the starting point of Vietnamese.

To summarise, the chapters assembled here show how Vietnamese has been framed by the dynamics of contact zones throughout its history, providing an instructive point of departure for appreciating overlapping metapragmatic regimes and language ideologies.