The Tongue Has No Bone: Vietnamese
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This Vietnamese proverb, the title of an excellent article by Edith Shillue, refers to a person who's got the gift of gab. The same might be said of Vietnam itself, a nation awash in linguistic and cultural riches.
Mind-bending diversity
For a country smaller than Newfoundland, Vietnam boasts mind-bending cultural diversity. Its hundred or so ethnic groups include important Chinese, Khmer, and Thai minorities, as well as ancient mountain tribes whose way of life has changed very little in a thousand years. A deeply spiritual nation, Vietnam practices a bewildering variety of faiths, including Roman Catholicism, Cao Dai, Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, and several tribal religions. Vietnamese culture further encompasses a northern subset, where China has historically been the primary outside influence, and a southern one, which traditionally looks to the Indian Ocean, and ultimately the West, for direction.
As one might guess, Vietnam's linguistic landscape is similarly intricate. Ethnologue estimates that fully 86 traditions from 5 different language families are spoken in modern Vietnam. World Scriptures' tally of Vietnamese Bibles underscores this, listing translations in 27 traditions besides the official language.
All of this in spite of the fact that Vietnamese is not merely the most-spoken language in Southeast Asia, but the 14th most-spoken language in the world, weighing in just behind French. This is even more impressive in view of the fact that Vietnamese is the official language of a single nation, which it shares with 85 other traditions.
A tonal language like Chinese, Vietnamese shares the Mon-Khmer language family with Khmer (Cambodian) and several Southeast Asian minority tongues. Some linguists consider it an isolate, a language not closely related to any other on earth. Others identify Muong, spoken by a northern mountain culture, as a close relative. Those who classify Vietnamese as an isolate may consider Muong part of the majority tradition. In fact, Vietnamese is fissured into three mutually intelligible regional dialects, which are in turn divisible into local dialects.
Marked by history
Modern Vietnamese has carried something away from every fold in its complex history. A thousand years of Chinese rule, ending in 939 CE, left behind a rich array of Chinese loan words. Many of these are no longer immediately comprehensible to modern sinophones; compare the more recent Norman French contributions to modern English.
During the Chinese period, Vietnamese remained unwritten; instead, literate Vietnamese used chu nho, China's ideographic system. In the 13th century, poet Nguyen Thuyen developed chu nom, a phonetic system based on kanji, in order to express himself in his own language. When the Chinese were driven out in the 17th century, chu nom enjoyed a surge in popularity, but was ultimately eclipsed by the Roman-based quoc ngu system developed by French missionaries.
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