Thy Tran's findings
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Joe’s blog entry on Vietnamese Chat Language
Joe was a student in a University of Hanoi. He has studied Vietnamese language for about 3 years and he now can speak Vietnamese as well as a Vietnamese does. His blog entries explore many aspects of Vietnamese culture. This blog entry about Chat Language has attracted over 1000 people commenting on it!) See this entry with English translation
Compare chat discourse and email message with a telephone conversation or letter
Chat discourse
- Form:
- Uses emoticons, symbols to express feelings
- Uses short phrases
- Uses abbreviations
- Uses colorful letters
- Uses numbers (ex. 2 stands for Hi, g9 for Good night)
- Content:
- The information is overlapping (One person says something, the other replies to it but then switches to another topic while the first person continues his/her topic)
- Miscommunication can occur, especially to the language with tone-markers, like in Vietnamese
- Example
Speaker A: Anh ay khong mail cho tau noi. (He hasn’t emailed me)
Speaker A: Ah tau goi anh cho anh ay roi (By the way, I sent him photos.)
Speaker B: (B thinks that “ goi anh” means “call”, so she interpreted the above sentence like: “I called him”) Rua a, vui khong? (Really, did you have a good talk?)
Speaker A:??? (A didn’t understand what B said)
Speaker A: ( A realized the miscommunication) Khong, tau noi la tau goi anh (send photos) (No, I said I had sent him photos.)
Speaker B: Oh… Tieng Viet khong dau (Oh, I see. How comes with Vietnamese without tone markers!)
Explanation: Because A and B couldn't use the tone markers in Yahoo Messenger system, '"goi anh" can be interpreted as "send photos" or "call him". This misinterpretation will not occur in a letter or via phone call as the writer will use the tone markers.
Email message discourse
Email messages are similar to chats in terms of using emoticons and abbreviations. However, email messages use less emoticons and abbreviations than chats. In emails, people tend to use short but correct sentences while in chats, people often use incomplete sentences.
Telephone communication
Users can express feelings (anger, happiness, jokes) by voice. The form of language is simple and informal.The speaker often uses the linking words such as “like”, “’cause”. The miscommuncation can occur but participants can overcome it. In telephone communication, tone plays the important role.
Letter
Letters can be informal or formal, depending on the relationship between the sender and the receiver. There are typical forms of letter for each situation (business letter, friendly letter, etc). The incomplete sentences tend not to be accepted/used often in letters. Usually, the reader hardly predicts the writer’s feelings unless the writer writes out his/her feelings. However, in this case the reader can read between the lines or can predict the writer’s feelings via handwriting.
Thy Tran 15:54, 24 June 2007 (EDT)
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