A study of pragmatic change in the Vietnamese

Language contact, bilingualism and contact-induced language change have created controversial issues among linguists as more and more people of different languages and cultures around the world come into contact. There have been studies of the phenomena of language change including code switching, code mixing, interference, transference, and convergence in different language dyads (Clyne, 2003), especially in multi-lingual societies like Australia, the United States of America and Canada. However, there is insufficient research into the Vietnamese language used in Australia and its changes in comparison with Vietnamese used in Vietnam. This empirical study, therefore, investigates the patterns of pragmatic transference in spoken Vietnamese used by the second generation speakers in Australia who are English-Vietnamese bilinguals.