HANOI UNIVERSITY OF BUSINESS AND TECHNOLOGY

FACULTY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE STUDIES

HOANG THUY LINH

RESEARCH PAPER

A STUDY ON BROKEN ENGLISH IN VIETNAMESE YOUTH’

COMMUNICATION

NGHIÊN CỨU VỀ HIỆN TƯỢNG SỬ DỤNG TIẾNG ANH BỒI CỦA

GIỚI TRẺ VIỆT NAM

Hanoi, 2022
ABSTRACT:

The history of Vietnam, as Branigin (1994) puts it, is “a saga of recurrent strife,
turmoil, invasion, occupation and hardship” (p. A22). After the doi-moi policy,
the country witnessed the emergence of the English language, which exerted
various profound influences on language attitudes, language change, and
language choice and use of the Vietnamese. Along with the rise of English, there
exists a phenomenon called “Broken English” which is deemed common among
young people. This study aims to investigate the usage of Broken English by
Vietnamese youth, focusing on their mistakes, the frequency of using broken
English, and their attitude towards this phenomenon. After that, the researcher
provides some solutions to solve this pressing issue.

A. INTRODUCTION

“English is an international language”, “English is a widely used language in the

world”, etc, these kinds of headlines have appeared in thousands of essays,
newspapers, and books for quite some time. It is no doubt that English has truly
become a global language, spoken and written by more than 1 billion people – a
number that exceeds any other language in the history of the world. However, it
is unusual in the fact that the vast majority of speakers are not native. Because of
that, English has developed into ‘Englishes’. This term refers to the
transformation of the English language, from the mother tongue of a handful of
nations to a language being used by far more speakers in many contexts from all
over the world. Some standard examples of Englishes are Singapore English,
Indian English, Japanese English, African English, etc. According to Braj
Kachru, the spread of English around the world has been conceptualized as three
concentric circles: Inner, Outer, and Expanding. While he does not explicitly
name Vietnam, he does imply that the country has always been a part of the
Third Circle.
With the population explosion in Vietnam, the country has witnessed a robust
number of English learners, especially the young ones. Young individuals in
Vietnam are found to use English on a daily basis more and more frequently.
Yet, there exists a struggle where many are not aware of the standard practice
and usage of the language and do not bother about grammar and syntax, which is
universally known under the name “Broken English”. The present dissertation,
therefore, aims to provide a brief overview of ‘Broken English’ and clarify its
effects on Youth in Vietnam. By doing so, this study hopes to add to the breadth
of work studying Vietnamese in contact with English and help learners
overcome this problem.

B. DEVELOPMENT

I. A brief overview of Broken English

1. What is Broken English?

After the Soviet Union’s support to the North in the Vietnam war, the country
witnessed the dominance of Russian as the first foreign language. It was not until
1986 when the Vietnamese government introduced economic liberalization
called “open-door policy” or “Doi Moi policy” that English had replaced
Russian. Ever since it has dominated almost every domain of social life. The
significant position of English in Vietnam, as Kachru (1990:5) observes,
“reflects what has been happening elsewhere. Globally, English has been on the
ascendancy, and this ascendancy now includes Vietnam”. Public opinions hold
that learning English is not only a “fashion” but also a “passport” for people to
have better jobs, earn a scholarship, etc. As a result, this has created the so-called
“English fever”. English classes have mushroomed. No one can really estimate
the number of public and private schools, as well as centers that are running
English training courses throughout Vietnam. However, quantity does not equal
quality. Many learners are found to face communication challenges and often
speak incorrect or awkwardly structured English. This phenomenon is usually
called “Broken English”.
After taking a brief look at the standard language ideology, it can be seen that the
term ‘Broken English’, while lacking a clear definition, is most commonly used
to construct negatively viewed ‘others’. Milroy (2001) points out that ‘the
standard ideology decrees that the standard is an idea in the mind – it is a clearly
delimited, perfectly uniform and perfectly stable variety – a variety that is never
perfectly and consistently realized in spoken used’. Hence, language that is
perceived as deviating from this uniform ideal may be described as broken. The
discourse of ‘broken English’, or the figurative use of the adjective ‘broken’ to
describe one’s linguistic incompetence, is a common feature of environments in
which English learning is a central preoccupation. This phrase deems to be
representative of a broader class of simplistic and usually negative absolute
descriptions, such as ‘poor English’, ‘bad English’, and so on.

It may be discrete, incomplete, and/or marked by faulty syntax and inappropriate

diction because the speaker’s knowledge of the language isn’t as robust as a
native one. For many non-native users, grammar has to be calculated rather than
naturally conjured, as is the case for many native speakers.

2. Description

2.1. Grammar

Vietnamese and English are two very different languages in terms of features.
One of the most significant differences is grammatical traits, which usually
befuddles Vietnamese people a lot. We can point out some of the grammatical
mistakes of learners in the following categories: Wh-questions, the omission of
articles and auxiliary verbs, and the usage of tenses and exclamatory sentences.

First, when making a question, the positions of Vietnamese question words, in

most cases, tend to appear at the end of the sentence. Meanwhile, in Standard
English, these words almost always stand at the beginning. Let’s take a look at
the following example:

Example one:
Vietnamese: Món ăn ưa thích của bạn là gì?
Standard English: What is your favorite dish?
Broken English: Your favorite dish is what?

Example two:

Vietnamese: Anh muốn đi du lịch ở đâu?

Standard English: Where do you want to travel to?
Broken English: You want to travel to where?

The word “gì” and “ở đâu” in the two examples mean “what” and “where”
respectively and they stay at the end of both sentences. This shows a common
syntactic feature of the Vietnamese question system, explaining why many
Vietnamese are likely to make mistakes when forming questions in English.

Second, there is a tendency to the omission of articles and auxiliary verbs in

Broken English. The following example will illustrate this characteristic:

Example:

Vietnamese: Anh có trông thấy cái cây ở đằng kia không?

Standard English: Are you seeing the tree over there?
Broken English: You seeing tree over there?

In some cases, speakers even get mixed up and use the three articles incorrectly.
This is due to the fact that they don’t have enough knowledge of how various
syntactic, pragmatic, and semantic factors affect article usage. For example:

Vietnamese: Vàng rất quý giá

Standard English: Gold is precious
Broken English: The gold is precious
Next is the usage of tenses. The most prominent feature of broken English is that
its users usually only focus on three tenses, i.e. simple present tense, simple past
tense, and simple future tense. The reason probably lies in the fact that in
English, tenses make changes to the form of a verb (Finch 2005) and are deemed
to bear the relation to grammar (Comrie, 1985); meanwhile Vietnamese has
tenses expressed in đã, đang, sẽ which are the indicators of past tense, present
tense and future tense respectively (Nguyen, 2009; Bui, 1952; Nguyen, 1988;
Diep 1992; Nguyen & Nguyen, 1998). The familiarity with their mother tongue
makes Vietnamese people find it difficult to comprehend any other tenses but the
three aforementioned ones. Let’s analyze the following example:

Vietnamese: Tôi chưa gặp cô ấy đã được 5 năm rồi

Standard English: I haven’t seen her for 5 years
Broken English: I don’t see her in 5 years

Finally, the exclamatory sentences in broken English can also show the
difference in word order between English and broken English illustrated by the
following example.

Example:

Vietnamese: Mỹ Tâm hát hay quá!

Standard English: How beautifully Mỹ Tâm sings!
Broken English: Mỹ Tâm sings so beautifully!

2.2. Lexis

The vocabulary and word usage also need to be taken into consideration as they
are the two factors that often confuse speakers the most. Here are some examples
to illustrate the word usage in broken English.

The first example is “knowledge is received”. When referring to knowledge that

is gained, they do not say “knowledge is received”, but rather “knowledge is
acquired”.
The second example is “pig meat”. At the base of the board, the phrase: “Thịt
lợn” is rendered into English as “pig meat”. Grammatically speaking, there is
nothing wrong with this, and nothing to blame as far as word meaning goes.
“Pig” means “lợn” and “meat” means “thịt”. The only problem is that the term
“pig meat” is simply meaningless to English speakers. This is a mistake that non-
native speakers usually stumble across as their vocabulary range is poor.

The above mistakes among thousand ones cited are made by a lot of Vietnamese
speakers. When speaking, they tend to think in their mother tongue and then
translate it into English. As a result, the conversation usually sounds very
unnatural, unintelligent, and seems incomprehensible to native English people.

3. Pragmatics

Broken English has the following characteristics. The first feature is the
combination of “Explanation” and “Compliment Downgrade” or
“Disagreement” in any responses (Tran Giao Quynh, 2008). For example:

A: Wow, your presentation skills are amazing! (Trời ạ, kỹ năng thuyết trình của
cậu đỉnh quá)
B: Not amazing! Just normal! (Đỉnh gì! Cũng thường thôi)
In Vietnamese culture, being humble is highly appreciated. Therefore, they hate
boasting and if they are commended for anything, they simply smile modestly
and show compliment downgrade, or disagreement.
The second feature is titles. In standard English, Mr, Ms, or Mrs accompanying
the first name is used to show respect to teachers, leaders, and so on. To be
specific, Vietnamese students often call their teachers “Mr. Thanh” or “Ms. Ly”.
Actually, “Thanh” and “Ly” are the first names. This is completely different
from Standard English which uses Mr., Ms., or Mrs. with the last names.

Another feature is greeting in broken English. The greeting, in most cases, is

somewhat indirect and depends on the context. For instance:
A: You have eaten dinner yet? (Cô ăn cơm chưa?)
B: No. Just got home from work (Chưa. Cô mới đi làm về)

The question “You have eaten dinner yet?” is not a question but a greeting in
Vietnamese.

II. Research Methodology

The research approaches Broken English from a qualitative and sociolinguistic

perspective. It aimed to find out the difficulties that young people in Vietnam
often have while speaking English, the reasons why they use Broken English,
and their attitudes towards it, and then provide some solutions to this problem.
Participants were 42 people from different universities in Hanoi. Most of them
have learned English ever since primary school. Each person was asked 11
following questions:

1. How old are you?

2. When did you start learning English?
3. Among 4 basic language skills, which one do you focus on most?
4. How often do you speak English in your daily life?
5. Do you often have difficulties while speaking English as your vocabulary
range is limited?
6. Do you often have difficulties while speaking English as the tenses
confuse you?
7. Do you often make mistakes of not using articles and auxiliary verbs while
speaking English?
8. Do you often make mistakes of not conjugating verbs while speaking
English?
9. How often do you use broken English while speaking?
10. Do you think that when communicating, it is not necessary to speak with
correct English grammar as long as you are understood?
11. Why do you use broken English?
The questionnaire was designed on Google form and was directly sent to
participants via message invitations and email. All the data were collected and
saved by the system.

III. Results

Question 1: Age

Information about the age of the respondents is provided in Figure 1.

Figure 1

As can be seen in Figure 1, the vast majority of respondents (approximately

93%) were aged between 18 and 25, with only 2,4% being above 25 years old
and 4,8% are from 13-18.

Question 2: When did you start learning English?

The second question deals with time at which individuals start to learn English.
The information is shown in Figure 2.
 Figure 2

It is clear from Figure 2 that in Vietnam, where English is used as a foreign

language, the majority of the participants (50%) started to learn the language at
primary school, followed by those at secondary school (38%). 7,1% started to
learn when they were in kindergarten. With respect to age, the older they are, the
later they study the language. Representing the lowest percentage, only 2,4%
were taught in high school and universities.

Question 3: Among 4 basic language skills, which one do you focus on most?

Figure 3
The purpose of question 3 is to find out which language skills are the
participants’ main priorities. Figure 3 indicates that most respondents (40,5%)
chose to concentrate equally on all 4 skills, followed by speaking skills at 38,1%.
The percentage of people focusing on listening skills is 31%. Meanwhile the 2
skills that are least likely to be priorities are reading and writing, with respective
figures being at 21.4% and 11.9%. These data imply that the majority of young
Vietnamese have probably become more aware of the importance of
communication skills (listening and speaking) in today’s world and therefore
choose to focus more on them.

Question 4: How often do you speak English in your daily live?

Figure 4

The fourth question helps to investigate the frequency at which people use
English in their daily lives. The results are provided in Chart 4.
What is clear from the pie chart is that the proportion of the respondents who
occasionally speak English takes up the biggest percentage (50%). The number
of speakers rarely using English is also considerable (23,8%). This result is not
surprising at all since English, though popular, is still only a foreign language in
Vietnam. The lack of appropriate environment makes it hard for many young
people to put it into practice. About 19% usually communicate in English while
only 7.1% always use English on a daily basis.

Question 5, 6, 7, 8:
These four questions relate to the difficulties/mistakes that young people often
encounter while communicating in English. These mistakes are considered as the
contributing factors or the features of broken English. The participants’ opinions
are indicated in Figures 5, 6, 7, 8.

Figure 5: Do you often have difficulties while speaking English as your

vocabulary range is limited?

Figure 6: Do you often have difficulties while speaking English as the tenses
confuse you?
 Figure 7: Do you often make mistakes of not using articles and auxiliary verbs
while speaking English?

Figure 8: Do you often make mistakes of not conjugating verbs while speaking
English?

In general, the majority of the participants regularly make mistakes or meet with
difficulties when using English. For the matter of vocabulary range, 85.7%
admitted they are lack of collocational patterns and often struggle with finding
the correct words to express their thoughts and opinions. Only 14.3% are
confident in their collocational usage.
In terms of English tenses, a high proportion believe that tenses are also another
barrier for them when communicating (61.9%). About 38.1% are optimistic that
they can express their ideas in the right form of tenses. Compared to Figure 5, it
seems like participants are more confident in handling tenses than vocabulary.
This can be explained by the fact that the results of teaching and studying
English in Vietnam is evaluated in grammar and reading comprehension rather
than writing, listening and speaking.

Figure 7 illustrates the frequency of omitting articles auxiliary verbs while

speaking. For this question, 61.9% reply “No”, 16.7% say they often make this
mistake. This percentage for the speakers who seldom encounter this problem is
21.4%.

As Figure 8 show, about three-fourths of the respondents reply “Yes” when

answering if the verbs are not often conjugated when they communicate,
followed by 33.3% percent say they occasionally make this mistake. This is
because in Vietnamese language system, verbs are never conjugated; that is, they
only have one form. On the contrary, the verb system of Standard English is very
dynamic. Thus, when participating in an English conversation, they can get
confused easily. However there is still a large number of respondents (40.5%)
claim they do not stumble over this mistake when speaking.

Question 9: How often do you use broken English while speaking?

Figure 9

As shown in Figure 9, the majority of the respondents occasionally speak broken

English (59,5%). Approximately 24% claimed they rarely use it, while 11,9%
said they communicate in broken English frequently.
What can be inferred from this result? It seems that broken English is a common
phenomenon in Vietnam. Despite the fact that English has been taught in this
country for more than 40 years, speaking skills of Vietnamese people, especially
the young, are still not ameliorated.

Question 10: Do you think that when communicating, it is not necessary to speak
with correct English grammar as long as you are understood?

Figure 10

This question aims to investigate participants’ attitudes towards this so-called

‘broken English’ phenomenon. The choice of the two opinions of “Necessary”
and “Unecessary” is almost equal with half of the respondents claiming that
grammar rules must be strictly followed. The other 47.6% opt for “unnecessary”,
while only 2.4% think it depends on the context. Putting aside the participants
that chose “necessary”, it is quite unsettling that there is still a vast majority of
young people who disregard the importance of grammar in communication.

Question 11: Why do you use broken English?

 Figure 11

There are many reasons that lead to the usage of broken English. The final
question relates to the problems encountered by many young Vietnamese. It is
noteworthy that this is a multiple-choice question, which means one participant
can have many reasons for this issue. As shown in Figure 11, the most important
one is poor vocabulary (52.4% of the respondents meet this problem). 42.9%
blame it on their poor grammar skills. 35.7% say both their grammar skills and
vocabulary are proficient but are still not able to communicate correctly due to
their anxiety or nervousness. 33.3% claim that they tend to forget basic
knowledge when having a conversation with others and decide to talk freely. A
remarkable percentage (23.8%) indicates that some speakers feel that it is
unnecessary to follow the rules. Only 2.4% blame it on the lack of an appropriate
environment. Surprisingly, contrary to popular belief that the lack of
environment for practicing English is the main cause, it turns out that the lack of
grammar skills and vocabulary is the foremost reason.

IV. SOLUTION

After analyzing the survey, several solutions to improve the oral skills of young
Vietnamese have been proposed.

First of all, it is vital to master grammar skills, especially the basic ones.
Grammar is ineluctable, it is the backbone of any language. It provides a
structure for sentences the way lintels can prevent a house from collapsing.
However, grammar makes sense only if you have been exposed to the language
for a reasonable length of time. In the beginning, learners need to know the
basics and pay more heed to speak. Additionally, reading and listening will
enhance their grammar as these activities can help them observe how English
works.

Secondly, students must extend their vocabulary. Reading is the best habit to
learn new words, but students should also take notes and underline the words
that they do not know. After that, they need to check the word's meaning in their
dictionary and write it down. Another wonderful way of learning the usage of a
new word is to listen to it being used by others. Thus, students can watch or
listen to stuff they find interesting so that they may not get bored easily.

The third solution is to try to overcome nervousness when speaking. It is

important to keep in mind that making mistakes is a part of learning, as long as
we learn from them. Whenever engaging in an English conversation, speakers
should try to take a deep breath and talk slowly. Students can also practice
speaking with others to build their confidence. It doesn’t necessarily have to be
native speakers, it can be their friends, teachers, etc.
Finally, learners should record their speaking during practice. By doing this they
can trace back the mistakes that they make and fix them for the next time. This
method can also allow students to see how far they have progressed and become
their motivation to continue the learning process.

V. CONCLUSION

This research study found that broken English is a common facet for many
young Vietnamese people which is used very commonly; however, many
expressed disdain, embarrassment, or other negative emotions about using. They
moderated their Vietnamese and English speech especially when their English
equivalents would not convey the same depth of meaning as the Vietnamese
term. Participants also indicated that they struggled to think of, how to express
certain concepts in English, indicating that not all broken English is simply a
matter of choice. Most of the participants did wish that they could improve their
speaking skills. With some solutions suggested, the researcher hopes that young
Vietnamese can overcome this problem and master their speaking skills
successfully.

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