Building My World, From the Ground Up
December 17, 2025
Under French rule, language became a major tool of control. As the French sought to control access to knowledge in Vietnam, they enforced a nation-wide colonial language policy. Over time, their influence extended beyond changing the writing system to altering the Vietnamese lexicon.
Through contextualization, the thesis questions the presence of French loanwords in Vietnamese, asking whether they are independent from their colonial origins, or if they exist merely as a manifestation of French colonialism.