The Problem of Peers in Vietnamese Interaction

The problem of peers inVietnamese interaction

Jack Sidnell & Merav Shohet University of Toronto

In Vietnamese, address (second-person reference) is typically accomplished by the use of a kin termregardless of whether the talk’s recipient is a genealogical relative or not. All Vietnamese kin termsencode a specification of either relative age or relative generation of participants, and there are noreciprocal terms akin to English ‘brother’ or ‘sister’; rather, a speaker must select between terms suchas ‘older brother’ (anh) or ‘younger sibling’ (em). Since generation is normatively associated with adifference in age, the result is a ubiquitous indexing of age and status hierarchies in all acts of address.This results in a problem for peers. How, in such a system, should they address one another (and alsoself-refer)? In this article, we describe the various practices that speakers use to subvert the system andthus avoid indexing differences of age or station. Specifically, we describe four practices: (1) the use oftrue pronouns in address and self-reference; (2) the use of proper names in address and self-reference;(3) the use of kin terms in address and pronouns in self-reference; and (4) the ironic use of kin terms inaddress. We conclude that the Vietnamese system well illustrates what is likely a universal tensionbetween hierarchy and equality in acts of address and self-reference, by showing how speakersdeconstruct the vector of age and indicate that they consider one another peers. We further suggestthat although the literature in this area has focused on the ways in which languages convey differencesof status and rank, social order is built as much upon relations of parity and sameness – onidentification of the other as neither higher nor lower than me – as it is upon relations of hierarchy.

In many languages, selection of a word corresponding to the English second-personsingular pronoun ‘you’ in any act of address inevitably indexes something about thesocial relationship between speaker and addressee (see Brown & Gilman !"#$ for aclassic analysis).1 For instance, French, German, Russian, and many other Indo-European languages feature a binary opposition between a ‘T’-form (French tu,German du, Russian ty) and a ‘V’-form (French vous, German sie, Russian vy). In theselanguages, particular uses of the ‘T’-form can be understood as indexing solidaritybetween speaker and addressee, informality of the context, or a speaker’s contempt forthe addressee, while particular uses of the ‘V’-form may convey distance, formality, orrespect.2 More structurally elaborate systems are common across Southeast Asia andhave been described for Javanese (Errington !"%%; Geertz !"#$), Lao (Enfield &$$';n.d.), Thai (Cooke !"#%; Haas !"#"), and Vietnamese (Luong !""$; Shohet &$!$).

In Vietnamese, a speaker may address another using a pronoun, a kin term, a propername, or a common noun (e.g. occupational title, ba· n ‘friend’, etc.), but in most

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situations, kin terms are preferred regardless of whether speaker and addressee aregenealogical relatives or not (see Cooke !"#%; Luong !""$; !.-H. Nguyen !""'; Thomp-son !"#)). Vietnamese includes no reciprocally used kin terms akin to English ‘brother-brother’, ‘cousin-cousin’, or ‘sister-sister’; rather, all terms specify the relative age orgeneration of speaker and hearer. So, for instance, we find pairs such as anh-em (‘olderbrother-younger sibling’), chi·-em (‘older sister-younger sibling’), bác-cháu (‘parent’solder sibling-niece/nephew’), ca· u-cháu (‘mother’s brother-niece/nephew’), chú-cháu(‘father’s younger brother-niece/nephew’), and so on. These examples allow us tonotice an additional complication with respect to the Vietnamese system: there is asensitivity to relations of status in the selection of terms for both address and self-reference.3 The Vietnamese system, with its alternate forms for both address and self-reference, thereby allows speakers to convey fine gradations of status asymmetry, and itis this feature that has been the focus of previous descriptions (e.g. Luong !""$; see alsoBenedict !"*'; Emeneau !")!; Spencer !"*), inter alia).4

Asymmetrical, hierarchically stratified social relations obviously play a crucial rolein the constitution and maintenance of social order, but so too do relations of sym-metry: relations, that is, between equals, peers, and those who consider themselvesfriends, associates, or contemporaries (Geertz !"'(; Schutz !"#&). Because the asym-metrical relations between kin (i.e. family members) serve as the dominant model forthe social universe in general in Vietnam, persons who consider themselves equalsmust, as it were, ‘step outside the system’ in order to convey this through the selectionof address and self-reference forms. Adding a linguistic perspective to a buddingliterature on the anthropology of friendship (e.g. Bell & Coleman !"""; Desai & Killick&$!$), this essay describes various practices by which Vietnamese-speakers circumventa system built towards the expression of asymmetry in order to propose, establish, ormaintain social relations of parity. While all the practices described here propose arelation of parity between speaker and addressee, or at least do not explicitly mark therelation as asymmetrical, they differ in terms of the level of intimacy that they claim.Some practices, such as the use of the true pronouns tao ‘I’ and mày ‘you’, are appro-priate only between close and intimate friends. Others, such as the reciprocal use of anhor ông in address (combined with a pronoun for self-reference), imply less intimacy butnevertheless presuppose an already established friendship. Finally, the combination ofa common noun such as ba· n ‘friend’ in address with a personal name for self-reference,somewhat ironically, requires no pre-existing social relationship and is a commonpractice in public broadcasting, where addressees form a heterogeneous and largelyunknown group.

The next section briefly sketches the normative practices involved in address andself-reference in Vietnamese. This has two parts. First, although the system includespronouns and names as possible forms, there is, as noted, a general preference for usingkin terms in both address and self-reference whether the interlocutors are genealogicallyrelated or not. Second, address and self-reference are frequently accomplished via aperspective-taking strategy in which, for instance, a mother will address her older childusing the kin term anh, thereby adopting the perspective of her younger,co-present child.

The Vietnamese system of person reference and addressAs noted above, it is possible to identify four main strategies available to Vietnamesespeakers for making self-, other (i.e. address), and third-person reference: ‘personalpronouns, common nouns (kinship and “status” terms), proper nouns [i.e. personal

The problem of peers in Vietnamese interaction 619


names]’, and ellipsis or ‘zero signs’, and Luong (!""$: ), ", !()5 suggests that these‘constitute integral parts of one single system of person reference’ that structuresinterlocutors’ hierarchical relations with one another and with third parties.

One of the complications in this system is introduced by the possibility of variousshifts in footing (Goffman !"'") and (indexical) transposition, whereby a speakeradopts the perspective of another person when speaking about a third party.6 Thismeans that a single utterance such as Me· dã mua cho ba cái mu hôm qua roi (‘MotherPAST buy for father CL hat yesterday already’,7 i.e. Mother already bought the hat forFather yesterday) can map onto a range of different interactional situations: motherspeaking to child; child speaking to mother; father speaking to mother; mother speak-ing to father; father speaking to child; child speaking to father; or child speaking tochild. Drawing on Luong’s study, Agha argues that the first six of seven cases pre-sented here are ‘denotationally anomalous in that they employ third person nouns inreferring to speaker and addressee (for which first and second person pronouns areavailable)’ (&$$': ()#-'). Agha further argues that these six cases of self-referential andvocative uses of kin terms in Vietnamese constitute ‘normalized tropes’ in encountersbetween kin. When such forms are then used for non-kin, as they routinely are, afurther trope comes into play – one that suggests hierarchical kin relations as a modelfor all social relations. This view of the social order is captured in the moral impera-tive: kính trên nhu’o’ng du’o’i (‘respect those above and yield to those below you’).

In some cases, perspective-taking strategies rooted in status asymmetries are nor-matively required, or, alternatively, prohibited. Luong suggests, for instance, that, ‘[i]nhis interaction with a younger sibling C, even a five year old child A is expected to referto his sibling B (B is A’s younger and C’s elder sibling) as anh (elder brother). C, bycontrast, is not supposed to make third-party references from his elder siblings’ per-spectives’ (!""$: )'). Thus, the very act of taking another’s perspective introduces whatSilverstein (&$$() calls a ‘second-order indexicality’, as it presupposes a hierarchicalrelation between speaker and addressee, whereby A calls B anh (older brother) whenspeaking to C, but C does not call B em (younger sibling) when speaking to A.

Sparring over statusIn order to give a sense of the complex ways in which this system is put into practice,we will now present a single, extended case that demonstrates how even children asyoung as ) years of age are able to index fine gradations of status through usage oromission of certain terms.8 Consider the following interaction between two youngQua?ng Nam (Central Vietnam) villagers. Here, !$-year-old Vie· t, the elder son of twofarmers, is spending the day at his maternal grandparents’ house, where his )-year-oldaunt Na is playing with her (-year-old sister Li under the supervision of Vie· t’s olderaunt, Hong, a college student also visiting for the weekend.9 On the table in front of Vie· tis a glass of water that Na wants to drink. She moves closer to the table and points to theglass, asking, ‘Who’s drinking this?’ (Cái ni ai uong dây?). Vie· t responds by dismissingher with the epithet on (noisy), which Na contests by using the informal interrogativeparticle, hı? (huh?), to initiate repair (see Schegloff, Jefferson & Sacks !"'') of Vie· t’s talk.This repair particle is considered appropriate when directed by a higher-status personto a lower-status person, but not the other way around.

Defending his status as senior to Na by virtue of his age, Vie· t refers to himself as ôngngoa· i (maternal grandfather) as he moves the glass away from Na and towards himself,telling her,

Jack Sidnell & Merav Shohet620


(!) V: !e? ông ngoa· i uongLeave-for grandfather maternal drink‘Let maternal-grandpa drink (i.e., it’s for me to drink)’

By self-referring in this way, Vie· t characterizes himself as older and more authoritativethan the )-year-old, whom he has implied is a nuisance with the epithet ‘noisy’. Theterm also positions Vie· t as the higher-status senior in a (possible) fictive conjugalrelationship where ông (grandfather) would take precedence over bà (grandmother) –the gender role appropriate for Na in this contextual framing. Na, however, does not goalong with this and instead initiates repair again, repeating the informal interrogativeparticle hı?? (huh?), and through this display of understanding failure withholds thehomage to which Vie· t’s self-identification with ông lays claim. Rather than back down,the boy repeats his assertion, !e? ông ngoa· i uong (it’s for maternal grandpa to drink)while pointing towards himself.

Seconds later, as Vie· t continues to refuse Na the glass of water, Na addresses hernephew not with the deferential kin term anh, which would signal his higher age statusover her (but would deny the genealogical relationship which the two in fact share), butwith the non-deferential, potentially scornful pronoun mi (second-person singular),apparently to protest his refusal to share the glass of water with her:

(&) V: Uong không du’o·’c (.) uong không du’o·’cDrink neg permission (.) Drink neg permission‘Drink not allowed (.) drink not allowed’ ((shaking his head, looking at N))

N: Mi uong chu’ ai uong&s drink certainly someone drink‘You drank [so] of course someone else can’ ((in quiet reasoned voice, as V reaches for glass))

Vie· t’s &(-year-old aunt Hong, who shares the perspective of Na that Vie· t is genealogi-cally junior and not in fact a senior peer of the girls, in turn intercedes by redirecting theboy’s attention. She menacingly commands him to pick up a pair of chopsticks underthe table by deploying in succession the (obviously status-degrading) address terms cu(penis) and con (child) in issuing her directive,

(() H: O’ cu con cúi xuongvoc penis child stoop down‘Yo penis child stoop down’

con lu’o’m hai chiec dua o?’ du’o’i bànchild pick up two cls chopstick loc under table‘boy [and] pick up that pair of chopsticks under the table’

When Vie· t returns to face Na, he discovers that she drank the remainder of the water inhis glass. Chagrined, he addresses her with a hyper-formal register. Calling Na bà(grandma), he begins with an accusatory interrogative:

(*) Bà uong het tro’n pha?i không?Grandmother drink clean out q‘Grandma [you] downed all of it right?’ ((looking straight at Na, she stares back))

The boy next further positions himself as the authority when Na stands her ground bynoting that Li had also drunk from the glass. Using the non-deferential form of zero



signs (anaphora), Vie· t states that, indeed, he had reserved some water for her littlesister, but adds that this was not intended for his rude interlocutor’s consumption.10

Again using the kinship term bà, he complains:

()) V: Ø !e? cho Bé Li uong, ai bie?u bà uong?Leave-ben little name drink, who give-permission grandmother drink

‘[I] left it for Little Li to drink, [but] who granted grandma permission to drink?’((complaining tone))11

As Na walks away from this confrontation, Vie· t turns back to the camera and asserts, inno uncertain terms, that the girl has been ‘rude’ (hon).

This example illustrates some of the resources for conveying status asymmetry, orhierarchy, that speakers of Vietnamese can and do regularly employ. As well, it illus-trates how alternate contextual frames can be brought to bear on a single occasion ofinteraction, with different consequences for the relative positioning of participants. Bycreatively and ironically using the system of reference and address as well as theinterrogative particle hı?, while disputing the matter of who has rights to drink from aglass of water, the two children differently frame the interaction as one between age-graded peers, where Vie· t commands deference from Na based on their relative ages, oras between kin, where Vie· t owes deference to Na based on their relative generations: anephew is junior to his aunt. When Na first addresses Vie· t with mi (second-personsingular) where she might have used anh (‘older brother’), she prioritizes (like most ofher household’s members) considerations of kinship to claim higher status over theboy. In return, Vie· t addresses her as bà (‘grandmother’). By using a term that overstatesthe actual difference in social status between speaker and recipient, Vie· t ironicallywithholds the deference that Na has claimed is due to her.

Their older aunt Hong briefly intervenes by challenging Vie· t’s claim to the seniorposition of ông ngoa· i: that is, master of the house. When she commands Vie· t to stoopdown and pick up a pair of chopsticks, Hong may be modelling for Na the option ofcalling Vie· t cu (literally, ‘penis’, but commonly used to refer to a ‘young boy’) and con(‘child’). Whereas for Na age and generation are dissonant, for Hong they are concord-ant, and thus, to conform to ubiquitous behavioural norms in which lower-statusindividuals must display respect to higher-status individuals, Vie· t now has no choicebut to obey Hong and divert his attention from the table. Upon his return, however, hereassumes a position of seniority and authority vis-à-vis Na, drawing her into hisincipient fiction in which if he is grandfather, then she is his inferior – by virtue ofgender – whether as merely an age-mate, or as fictional wife, bà (grandmother). This isa frame in which neither age nor generation matters so much as does the (conjugal)gender hierarchy in which a man is traditionally the master of his wife and superior toother women of a similar age.12

As we have noted, kinship terms are used not only among kin such as these children,but also for address and self-reference among persons who are not genealogicallyrelated. Native speakers understand such usages as essentially equivalent to the use ofpronouns in other languages, such as English, which is to say, as unmarked. Thus,native-speaker assistants translate or gloss anh, for instance, as ‘you’ or ‘I’ when it is usedto address or self-refer outside of a genealogical connection, but they simultaneouslynote that such uses are constrained by rules having to do with the relative rank or ageof participants in the speech encounter (see Silverstein !"'#). So, for instance, a man of



the speaker’s father’s generation can be addressed as bác (older than father), ca· u or chú(younger than parent), or possibly ông (‘grandfather’). A man of one’s own generationis addressed as anh if older, or em if younger, and a husband is likewise addressed by hiswife as anh, whereas a husband will address his wife as em regardless of the pair’srelative ages.13

Misuse of a kin term – or non-use in favour of a pronoun – counts as a rule violationand can be the object of negative social sanction. Use of a name, for instance inself-reference or in address where the addressee is significantly older or in some othersense deserving of respect, may be found ‘impudent’ or ‘fresh’ (hon), and even withjuniors, use of a pronoun or ellipsis instead of a kin term is taken to indicate disap-probation (Luong !""$; Shohet &$!$; see also Agha &$$': ()' on this point). In short,relations of hierarchy and status difference not only structure the linguistic system, theyare also supported by a web of social norms and constitute a fundamental aspect of thehabitus of everyday life (see Shohet &$!$; &$!(; see also Hanks &$$)).

The system is thus massively built towards the expression of asymmetry and createssomething of a problem for persons who consider themselves peers and friends: if thespeaker employs a kin term in address, s/he can convey the positive affect that theseterms embody, but will necessarily imply a status difference between him- or herselfand the one so addressed. Conversely, if the speaker employs a pronoun or name inaddress, s/he can avoid conveying a difference of status between her- or himself and theother, but is vulnerable to being heard as rude or distant, as we explain below.

The normative momentum of the system is thus towards the expression of asym-metries.14 In what follows, we describe four practices that speakers may use to poten-tially avoid conveying differences of age or station along with their collateral effects:15

(!) using pronouns; (&) using proper names without kinship or status terms in addressand self-reference; (() using kin terms in address and pronouns in self-reference; and(*) ironically using kin terms in address. It is then suggested in conclusion that theVietnamese system well illustrates what is likely a universal tension between hierarchyand equality in acts of address and self-reference (see Duranti !""'). In other words,although the Vietnamese system is tilted or biased towards the expression of hierarchi-cal relations and asymmetry, the practices described below in this article work againstthe grain to convey a sense of equality and symmetry between speaker and hearer.

The use of pronouns tao and mày or reciprocal mình amongsocial intimatesTao and mày are true pronouns: these words have no other use than that of referring topersons in the immediate speech encounter and they lexically encode the meaning‘first-person singular’ and ‘second-person singular’ respectively. Tao is sometimesdescribed as ‘arrogant’ or ‘abrupt’ (Thompson !"#): &*"), and native speakers imagineor report that this was the term used by the King in making self-reference. In that sense,it stands in opposition to tôi, which in the contemporary language is also a truepronoun that does not convey a sense of self-elevation.16 Mày is paired with tao tosignal contempt or disregard for the recipient. Use of these terms, then, involves awithholding of the normal status-marking characteristic of Vietnamese address andself-reference in such a way as to generate implicatures of contempt and so on.17 It isnot surprising, therefore, that occasions for the ‘literal’ use of tao and mày are relativelyrare (e.g. between a mother and child who is being scolded, a master and a servant,etc.). Thompson writes that such terms ‘signal that the speaker considers the hearer



grossly inferior’, and goes on to note that, in this use, ‘the forms are usually arrogant,and this connotation colors them generally so that they seem to be little used today inmost conversational situations’ (!"#): &*").

These terms are routinely used, however, in another way – not, that is, to expresscontempt for the other and high regard for oneself, but rather to convey extremefamiliarity and intimacy between close friends. Consider the following example from atelephone conversation between two urban North Vietnamese-speakers. Here, near theopening of the call, A jokes with B, saying, Bê-dê pha?i không? ‘You’re gay huh?’ When Binitiates repair with Ha??, A repeats the joking insult-question but now includes thepronoun mày.

(#) ((VI_Callfriend_*&"!_@$:&())

! A: Bê-dê pha?i không?Gay q‘You’re gay, right?’

& B: Ha??‘What?’

( A: Mày bê-dê pha?i không?&s gay, q‘You’re gay, right?’

* B: O’i (A&B Laugh)‘Uh’

Here, the pronoun occurs in the course of a tease between close friends, suggesting thata crucial presupposition of intimacy underlies its use. Extract ' further illustrates theuse of both tao and mày, again in a situation where the two urban North Vietnameseyoung men are joking.18 Notice in particular that in the talk between lines ! and * theparticipants use zero forms to refer to self and other. It is only when Vu complains thathe has no money that the pronouns tao and, somewhat later, mày are used. Variouskinds of evidence indicate that the participants are joking here and, further, that therelationship is characterized by extreme informality. Thus when Tuan asks, Mày ke·tnhiêu? (‘How much do you need?’), Vu responds with Khoa?ng hai ba ngàn à (‘Abouttwo to three thousand [dollars]’). This is a large amount of money, but the talk isproduced in such a way (with the estimating Khoa?ng, ‘About’) to suggest otherwise. Itis important to see how this talk develops with Vu first asking whether Tuan has beenworking, and then suggesting that he needs money – that is, the sequence up until line) suggests that Vu might be getting ready to make a request. And of course, a questionlike Tuan’s Mày ke·t nhiêu? (‘How much do you need?’) is interpretable as anticipatingjust such a request and potentially as leading to an offer (an offer that would obviate theneed for the request to be made). Now, when Vu reveals the amount of money he needsin line ", Tuan laughs and Vu immediately responds with reciprocal laughter. This thenleads into the expletive address with !u· me· (‘Motherfucker’) and the subsequent jokingsuggestion to ‘Go shave your head and sell that’.

(') ((VI_Callfriend_*&"!_@):!&))

! Vu: Sao? Ho?m này có di làm cái gì không?How? Day now q go work what neg‘So? Did you go to work lately?’



& Tuan: !u· . Cung di làm bình thu’o’ng thôi cho’ dâu có gì,Fuck. Still go work normal no that not have what‘Fuck. Still going to work as usual’

( Vu: Làm bình thu’o’ng ha?? O’, sam gì chu’a?Work normal huh? Uh, buy what yet‘Work as usual huh? Uh, bought anything yet?’

* Tuan: Ha??Huh?

) Vu: Tao dang thieu tien, ke·t tien " mà.!s prog lack money, tied up money that that‘I don’t have enough money now, it’s kinda tied up’

# Tuan: Ha??Huh?

' Vu: !ang ke·t tùm lum tùm la het.prog tied up messy/everywhere all.‘It’s all tied up at the moment’

% Tuan: Mày ke·t nhiêu?&s stuck much?‘How much do you need?’

" Vu: Khoa?ng hai ba ngàn àAbout two three thousand ah‘Only about two, three thousand’

!$ Tuan: !u· me· ... thang này ...Motherfucker ... cl this ...‘Motherfucker ... you ...’

!! Tuan: Mày ca· o tro· c di,&s shave bald go‘Go shave your head’19

!& Vu: Ha??‘What?’

!( Tuan: Mày ca· o tro· c di thì bán&s have bald go so buy‘Go shave your head and sell that’

These extracts exemplify well the common use of the pronouns tao and mày to conveyextreme informality and intimacy between friends. They do this, it seems, by withhold-ing the markings of asymmetry and respect for one another normally called for inconversation.

An alternative practice involves the use of the pronoun mình, which can refer to bothfirst and second persons (speaker and addressee, respectively), whether in the plural orsingular. This usage is common among friends of about the same age, or in informalcontexts among family members, as illustrated in the following extracts, where we see:(Extract %) Hong (H) use mình to refer to herself when addressing her mother andothers in reporting how she bought a watermelon to bring to her household in thevillage; (Extract ") Hong’s mother (B) use mình to refer to herself and her grandchil-dren when telling Hong that they will eat the damaged watermelon; and (Extract !$)Hong’s aunt (Mo·’, about twelve years older than Hong) use mình to address the latter’sboyfriend familiarly, asking him if he likes the village:



(%) $(($&$$'C!T&_&QNDX-!'!*$*

H: Chieu mình xin mo· t cái bao lo’n, mình xuong mình mua du’a dem raAfternoon !s beg one cl bag big !s go down !s buy melon carry away‘This afternoon I asked for a large bag [when] I went down to buy a melon to bring here’

(") $(($&$$'C!T&_&QNDX-!"!"!'

B: Cái nó han nát quá de? o?’ du’o’i, mình en((an))cl (s (s crushed excessively leave at under !s eat‘That one is too mushy, leave it down here we’ll eat it’

(!$) $(($&$$'C!T&_&QNDX-()$%&"

Mo·’: ve dây mình thay rang vui không?Come here &s see that happy q‘Do you like it here [in the village]?’

As with tao and mày, however, use of mình is considered rude among non-intimates.Among non-equals, the senior-status participant may use his or her name or the pronounmình in self-reference and an alternative form, such as the junior person’s name, inaddress.The junior-status person, in turn, is expected to use a kinship term or title for theaddressee and refer to him- or herself using a kinship term or the pronoun mình. This isevident in the following extract, where Chi addresses her older brother with the kinshipterm and name (anh Tu·’u) while referring to herself with the pronoun mình:

(!!) $&!'&$$'T!_!p(SingingLunch-(#(*$&

C: Anh Tu’u· hát dau mình hát sauElder brother name sing first !s sing after‘Tu’u· [you] sing first, I’ll sing after’

Based on such extracts and study participants’ meta-discursive comments, our datasuggest that mình conveys a greater degree of intimacy and less formality than does thepronoun tôi (further discussed below), and is widely used in a variety of situations. Incontrast, the use of tao – mày is narrowly restricted to interaction among intimates, andnative speakers suggest that these pronouns are appropriately used primarily forpersons who have grown up together from childhood.

The use of names for address and self-referenceIn addition to the pronouns tao-mày or mình, friends may also use each other’spersonal names reciprocally to defeat inferences about relative age, rank, or genera-tional difference. Although relatively common, use of names in this context can besomewhat distancing and can convey a lack of intimacy, since in using a term that doesnot encode a kinship relationship, the speaker potentially invites the inference that nosignificant social bond exists – that is, that speaker and recipient are simply contem-poraries but not socially linked in a significant way.20 An example of the usage of namesis provided by the instance below. Here, Lan and Die·p, two urban Southern Vietnamesewomen in their late twenties, are talking. Lan is describing troubles she has encounteredin caring for an infant relative.

(!&) V_CF_*&!& – Lan và Die·p

! Die·p: À. O’ lúc Lan go· i cho Die·p là có anh Thái ngoi dó ha??when name call ben name conj q elder brother Thái sit there q

‘Oh. Uh when Lan called Die·p, Thái was sitting there?’



& Lan: U’. Cái nó...Then (s

Yes. Then he ...

( Die·p: ÀUh

* Lan: Cái nó ngu? . Cái ... mo’i, Lan mo’i nói ...The (s sleep. Then ... just. name just talk‘Then he slept. Then ... Lan was just talking’

) Nó ngu? là, lúc nó ngu? du’o·’c mu’o’i phút là Lan go· i cho Die·p gì(s sleep conj when (s sleep get ten minutes conj name call ben name q‘He slept for about ten minutes when Lan called Die·p, (right?)’

# Nó ngu? to’i lúc nói chuye·n, dang nói chuye·n vo’i Die·p là nó tı?nh da·y nu’a.(s sleep reach when chat, prog chat with name conj (s awake up again.‘He slept till when I was talking to Die·p then he woke up again’

Notice that both Lan and Die·p use a name in both self-reference and address – this isan unmarked usage and does not generate inferences about footing shifts and so on (asthe use of one’s name in self-reference typically does in English – so-called illeism, à la‘Bob Dole is back’). As Searle writes, names have the advantage of being essentiallydevoid of any characterizing feature:

The uniqueness and immense pragmatic convenience of proper names in our language lie precisely inthe fact that they enable us to refer publicly to objects without being forced to raise issues and cometo agreement on what descriptive characteristics exactly constitute the identity of the object. Theyfunction not as descriptions, but as pegs on which to hang descriptions. Thus the looseness of thecriteria for proper names is a necessary condition for isolating the referring function from thedescribing function of language (Searle !")%: !'&).

In Vietnamese, use of names in self-reference and address allows the speaker to avoidformally characterizing the relationship between him- or herself and the recipient, and,perhaps not surprisingly, this usage is quite common among classmates, who typicallyare roughly of the same age and status.

Reciprocal use of names, in short, is thus an effective means to convey parity, sincenames allow speakers to self-refer and address without simultaneously characterizingthe referent or social relationship between speaker and addressee. Thus among threerelated Central Vietnam boys, for example, where )-year-old Duy was technically the‘grand-uncle’ of '-year-old Ti and !$-year-old Hí, use of names allowed them tointeract as peers rather than in the hierarchical relationship that use of appropriatekinship terms might have entailed. In this instance (Extract !(), the three natives ofan urbanizing suburb of !à Nang were jumping and dancing on pillows at Ti andHí’s uncle’s house in the absence of adult supervision, calling out to each otherto watch their acrobatic moves and ‘dance’ in front of the video camera filmingthem.

(!() $*&&&$$'C!T*_*F(HouseKids – Boys Horsing Around

! H: Nè, coi Hí nèHere see name here‘Here watch Hí [me] go’ ((dives onto the mattress, followed by Ti. They both get up and jump

around, emitting response cries)) [some talk omitted]



& D: Gio’ to’i Duy nha?yNow next name dance‘Now it’s Duy’s [my] turn to dance’ ((as he tumbles onto the mattress, followed by more

horsing around by all three boys)) [some talk omitted]

( T: Duy xem ba· n nha?y nè Duy nèname watch friend dance here name here‘Duy watch me dance here Duy’ ((more horsing around by all three)) [some talk omitted]

* T: Duy nha?y diname dance go‘Go ahead and dance, Duy’

Such reciprocal use of names among near age-mates often continues into adulthood –again, largely to key the situation as informal and the relation between the participantsas one of parity.21

Address and self-reference in a public mediumAn interesting twist on what we have so far argued arises in the case of public broad-casts, where radio personalities cannot assume intimacy but rather must recurrentlyaddress a socially heterogeneous and largely unknown listening public. The Vietnamesesystem of address and self-reference is singularly ill suited to such contexts, since, as wehave shown, the entire system is founded upon situations in which speaker and recipi-ent are in an established and already known relation to one another. Vietnamese radiopersonalities have, however, adopted a number of practices in order to handle thissituation of a largely anonymous listening public. For instance, a speaker will com-monly use các ba· n (‘friends’) to address the listening audience. This is an adaptation ofan everyday, vernacular practice for addressing a mixed-sex, mixed-age group ofpersons of roughly equivalent status. The form works because it is non-specific withrespect to social indexicality: that is, it does not convey anything specific about therelations between speaker and recipient beyond a vague sense of parity.22 Of course, thecompound would not be appropriate for a student addressing a group of teachers or achild addressing a group of adults. Notwithstanding such cases of obvious and extremestatus differences, however, it is widely usable and is appropriate to the radio context inwhich broadcasters address the ‘public’ and thereby constitute listeners as a collectivitycomposed of ‘peers’: that is, persons of roughly equivalent status (Gal &$$#; Gal &Woolard &$$!; Warner &$$&).

Occasions in which the radio broadcaster or interviewed guests must self-refer, intalk directed to the listening public, are more complex, however, since use of a kin termfor self-reference would necessarily presuppose a corresponding kin term for one’saddressee. Again, since no appropriate kin term is available in radio broadcasts, wherethe addressed public is assumed to be heterogeneous, participants routinely avoid themand instead adopt a range of alternate strategies, including use of pronouns such as tôi(Extract !*) or mình (Extract !)), names (Extract !#), and zero forms (anaphora, Extract!'). These following examples are taken from a radio interview with a well-knownsinger and song-writer sister-brother team:

(!*) Pronoun tôi:tôi tên là Pha· m Ngo·c Châu!s name is name‘My name is Pha·m Ngo· c Châu’



(!)) Pronoun mình:23

Còn do uong thì mình thích nhat là uong nu’o’c bu’o?’i épAnd for drinks, comp !s like best is drinking grapefruit juice‘And as for drinks, it’s grapefruit juice that I like the best’

(!#) Name:Khánh Linh tên day du? là Pha· m Khánh Linhname name full is name‘My full name is Pha·m Khánh Linh’

(!') Ellipsis:Ø rat thích hoaReally like flowers‘I really like flowers’

In these situations, then, the participants specifically avoid the use of kin terms inself-reference, since again, use of a kin term for self-reference necessarily presupposes acorresponding kin term for the addressee.

This problem of self-reference and address is, of course, not a new one. Marr notesthat the same problem has plagued orators, journalists, novelists, and other writers forat least a century (!"%!: &#). In the !"&$s and !"($s, advocates of ‘modernization’proposed reforms to deal with the situation, for example by insisting that the first-person pronoun tôi, formerly meaning ‘subject of the king’, would become more akinto je and moi in French, while the term dân – formerly meaning ‘children of the ruler’– could be reformed to something more like the English ‘people’ or ‘citizens’.24 Inpractice, audiences often continued to be addressed with honorific kinship terms suchas ông bà (lit. grandfathers and grandmothers) ‘plus whatever additional pronouns,higher or lower, were deemed suitable to the particular audience’, although gradually‘more democratic orators shifted to “older and younger brothers and sisters” (anh chi·em)’ to address their followers (Marr !"%!: &#).

The term dong chí (comrade) was adopted and widely used by the time of the AugustRevolution of !"*), when, following Allied defeat of the Axis powers (including VichyFrance and Vietnam’s Japanese occupiers), the Communist Party, under the leadershipof Ho Chí Minh, took hold of Hanoi and the printing press. Yet here, too, the terms anhchi· (elder brothers and sisters) tended to be appended to the less hierarchically marked‘comrade’ term (Marr !"%!: &'). Although such a usage was intended to signify thesolidarity of brotherhood among Marxists of this era (Luong !"%%), with Ho’s cabinetmembers addressing each other and being referred to with the relatively more egalitariananh term (as compared with terms indexing greater seniority and deference, such ascu· , ông, ngài, vi· quan, etc., formerly used for court officials and colonial ministers),hierarchical distinctions were never entirely eliminated. Thus, Ho Chí Minh himself wasaddressed and referred to with honorific classifiers and titles such as vi· chu? tích (honouredChairman) or cu· (great grandfather) before his death, and even Ngu’o’i (His Holiness)afterwards (Luong !"%%: &*%). Moreover, the term dong chí (comrade) – whether or notaccompanied by a kinship term – had, by the !"%$s (and in our contemporary observa-tions), come to imply formality and respect not unlike, perhaps, the expressions vi· quanor ngài quan (revered mandarin) that it had been intended to replace.

In other words, while our conversational data may well point to a contraction in theusage of honorific address terms prevalent before the Communist era, and a possibleincrease in usages of natively construed ‘affectless’ terms such as ba· n (friend), as Luongwrites, ‘neither the dimensions of hierarchy and formality, nor the hierarchical



ideology, vanish with the emergence of Marxist power’ (!"%%: &*%). This neverthelessgives rise to the question of how, in the late/post-socialist era, persons who do considerthemselves peers are to address one another without indexing (a) the extreme intimacyand informality of personal names or the pronouns tao-mày or mình, or (b) theimplication of social distance that the non-use of kin terms almost inevitablyimplies.

A polite fiction of addressThe problem of peers in address, and one solution to it, were made apparent to Sidnellin the following way. On one of his initial trips to Hanoi, Sidnell was hosted by an olderman of his own generation (approximately five to ten years older). Host and guest inthis situation could be seen as roughly equivalent along a number of dimensions inaddition to age: both were university professors, both were married, and both had moreor less adult children. Moreover, Sidnell had been a Ph.D. classmate of the host’s wife.In this situation of rough equivalence where the larger social relation was one of localhost and visiting guest, the expectation is not for the host to use em in address and theguest to use anh, as would be predicted by age alone. Rather, the situation calls for‘reciprocal’ use of anh in address.

While it is clear that in the particular case described here a number of ratherunique factors were at play – for instance, the need to show respect to a visitor fromanother, ‘highly regarded’, country – reciprocal anh usage between males of roughlythe same age is actually widespread. Again, this is what we call a ‘polite fiction’, sinceit is logically impossible for both persons to be (classificatory) ‘older brothers’ to eachother.

In Sidnell’s case, the details of the ‘polite fiction’ were made explicit through arepeated error on his part. As should be obvious from the description of the Vietnam-ese system we have provided, in many situations a speaker will use the same term (e.g.anh) in self-reference as his interlocutor uses in address. You call me anh and I refer tomyself in the same way; I call you em and you refer to yourself in the same way.However, when Sidnell used anh for self-reference in speaking to his host, he wasimmediately corrected: ‘you use tôi’ (first-person singular pronoun). This error and itscorrection thus exposed something of the ‘logic of practice’ here: anh is properly usedonly to confer respect (honour) to the other, but not to claim it for oneself. The practicethus implicates a second dimension of moral conduct. The first order is expressed inaddress and involves the familiar use of a kinship term to elevate the other and therebyto confer respect. The second order is expressed in self-reference and involves theless familiar selection of a pronoun to avoid the indexicality of status or respectdifferential.25

The system of person-reference and address thus seems to create a problem forfriends or peers – persons who consider themselves equals – in the following way: if thespeaker employs a kin term in address, s/he can convey the positive affect that theseterms embody, but will necessarily imply a status difference between her- or himselfand the one so addressed. Conversely, if the speaker employs a pronoun or name inaddress, s/he can avoid conveying a difference of status between her- or himself and theother, but is vulnerable to being heard as rude (as was the case of Na and Vie· t inExtracts !-) above). Although some friends do use the pronouns mày and tao orreciprocally use the pronoun mình for both reference and address, thereby expressingconsiderable intimacy, for many dyads this would not be considered appropriate. The



practice of reciprocal address with anh (or chi· for women) is therefore one solution tothe problem that the system appears to generate. This involves a mutually maintainedfiction, perhaps begun a century ago with the elevation of the pronoun tôi (but withoutthe implementation of a ‘neutral’ second-person pronoun), in which two personsaddress each other as classificatory older brother (or sister, among women).26

The ironic use of kinship terms in addressWe will now consider a related solution, which is exemplified in a telephone conversa-tion between two young urban North Vietnamese men, to whom we refer as ‘Co?n’ and‘Thua·n’. In this conversation, Co?n typically addresses Thua·n as anh and self-refersusing tôi (i.e. the pattern discussed above). By contrast, Thua·n addresses Co?n with ông(‘grandfather’), and again self-refers with tôi (first-person singular pronoun).27 The twomen are contemporaries: both are in their early thirties and attended school together.Use of ông here, then, is perhaps similar to British men addressing each other as ‘oldman’ or ‘old chap’. Presumably by selecting a term that is clearly not literally correct oraccurate – insofar as the person so addressed is not in fact significantly older than thespeaker – the speaker avoids conveying the status differential that would attach to anyliteral use of the term. The strategy here, then, involves irony in Grice’s sense of sayingone thing to mean its (conventional) opposite – that is, saying ‘age status difference’ tomean ‘age status equivalence’ (Grice !")').

This example raises the following question: why would a speaker choose to addressthe interlocutor with ông rather than anh? Or, put another way, what’s the differencebetween these two forms of address? Here we will allow ourselves to speculate: ôngconveys intimacy, as does anh, but adds to it a sense of jocularity. In the conversationwe described above, Co?n typically addresses Thua·n as anh; however, on one occasion heuses ông. Here is that case:

(!%) Co?n and Thua·n

! Thua·n: The du’o·’c roi, vài hôm nu’a tôi se gu?’i cho ông mo· t cái cái catalogue có ca? ay nhá‘Alright, in a few days, I’ll send you a catalogue that includes that thing’

& Co?n: ! Ông vu’t cho tôi ... cái cái day thôi ...Grandfather slide-give for !s ... cl cl thing only‘Just toss me that thing’ (Idiomatic gloss)

( cái dau mà có da he·‘that operating system that has multiple systems’

It will be observed that Co?n is making a request for Thua·n to send him something(apparently a video-system that will play both PAL and NTSC formats). So here, theonly time he uses ông, he is making a request and, moreover, making it in a way thatattempts to downplay the imposition it inevitably embodies. Notice that he does notjust say cho tôi (‘give me’) but adds the verb vu’t (‘slide/throw’) to imply a certainspontaneity or casualness (akin to the English, ‘just toss me that thing when you get achance’). Use of ông here, with its jocular flavour, may then be consistent with the effortto minimize the imposition of the request by use of the verb vu’t ‘toss’. Curl and Drew(&$$%) have proposed that the selection of a request form in English is sensitive to boththe degree of imposition (what they call ‘contingency’) and the level of entitlement. Useof the verb vu’t ‘toss’ responds to the matter of imposition (suggesting that what is



being asked for is a small favour), while use of ông responds to the issue of entitlement,upping the ante of friendship claimed, as it were.28

The foregoing discussion might lead us to conclude that the meaning of anh issimilar to that of the Malagasy term dadafara, which Bloch writes could be glossedsimply as ‘older male than ego’ (!"'!: %*). Bloch goes on to write, however, that this‘would obviously be unsatisfactory and also unnecessarily imprecise’, since, accordingto him, kinship terms (such as dadafara) are not simply tools for accomplishingreference, but also simultaneously moral terms that speakers use strategically to effectreal changes in the world – they are, as we would now say, ‘performative’. What a glosssuch as ‘older male than ego’ misses, of course, is just the moral meaning and tacticaluses to which the term is put. In the case of anh, any attempt to define its meaning mustrecognize its essential connection to the kinship system. To address someone as anh (orông) is to suggest not merely that he is an older male to whom I must show respect but,moreover, that he is an older male to whom I am socially connected.29 Native speakersremark that use of pronouns can be ‘distancing’, as such use implies an absence of theconnection that the kin term conveys. Given the nature of Vietnamese kin terms, thissuggests that almost all relations are to be construed either as ‘distant’ and ‘anonymous’(with a pronoun) or as ‘connected’ but hierarchically structured.

This contrasts with the classic finding for the American kinship system as reportedby Schneider and Homans (!"))). These authors reported that use of a kin term inexpressions such as ‘Uncle Bill’, for instance, invoked the formal, institutionalizedstructures – the norms – of a kin system, whereas use of the name alone conveyed a‘personal’ connection not mediated by the institutional structure of kinship. Theywrite:

The pattern seemed to be that wherever there was strong affect, either positive or negative, the ‘uncle’form would be dropped and the first name alone used. Alternatively, if we think of these terms asstatus designators, the first name may imply either the equality of the speaker with the person referredto or the inferiority of the latter. Where the affect was mild, one way or the other, and the relativestatuses were simply those expected in the kinship norms, the uncle term was used (Schneider &Homans !")): !&$$, emphasis added).30

Unlike the case of American English, in Vietnamese, the ‘feeling’ or ‘affect’ of kinshipcannot be invoked independently of the hierarchical relations by which it is structured.

A telling instance of this pairing of hierarchical kinship usage and implied affectiveintimacy involved the Vietnamese promotion of Michael Jackson’s tour film, This is it,which came to theatres in Hanoi when Sidnell was conducting fieldwork in &$$". Noattempt was made to translate the title literally. Rather, the film was renamed !ó là anh,literally meaning, ‘This is him’, but used as a vernacular expression to mean, ‘That’s theway he is,’ or ‘That’s just him’.31 With this, the translators conveyed not only the respectthat many Vietnamese felt for the world-famous entertainer, but also the positive affect,or, in a word, the love, viewers felt for the late pop star. This practice of referring tonotable figures in the kinship idiom, moreover, is not restricted to the late/post-socialistera. Indeed, the late architect and leader of the Vietnamese Communist Revolution, HoChí Minh, is to this day commonly referred to by many Vietnamese with the kinshipterm Bác Ho (Uncle Ho, lit. father’s older brother Ho), which indexes an affective,rather than merely political relationship.32 In short, then, among social peers for whomusing pronouns that index extreme intimacy is not a viable option, the polite fictionthat we have discussed proves rather convenient, and this perhaps explains why it is so



widespread. In other words, this fiction allows contemporaries to convey a feeling ofconnectedness without at the same time implying a hierarchical relation.

ConclusionIn the Vietnamese context, a pervasive orientation to and awareness of social hierarchy,rooted in a model of the extended, multi-generational family but mapped onto thesocial world as a whole, provides the backdrop for the practices we have described,practices that can be seen to depart from the presumption of hierarchy and socialdifferentiation. Specifically, the practices of address and self-reference described heredo not so much convey equality or absolute parity as they imply the bracketing of theordinary assumption of asymmetrical differentiation and the often-associated intimacyexpected in such relations.

The literature on address and self-reference – whether focused on the languages ofAsia, Europe, or Africa – has focused on the ways in which languages convey differencesof status and rank (again, see Brown & Gilman !"#$; Cooke !"#%; Errington !"%%; Luong!""$, among others). There has been a corresponding lack of attention to the variousways in which languages provide their speakers with the means to convey (and thus toconstruct) non-hierarchical relations – whether affectively distant or close. To someextent, this situation reflects a more general set of anthropological assumptions aboutthe nature of social order and the social world – that it is fundamentally structured inhierarchical terms. And we see, then, that only recently has the topic of friendship – asopposed to kinship – come under the anthropological lens in a sustained way (e.g. Bell& Coleman !"""; Desai & Killick &$!$). There are exceptions to this general tendency –most famously perhaps Evans-Pritchard’s discussion of Nuer ox-names or Cot Thak.Evans-Pritchard writes that age-mates and ‘men of about the same age’, or in adjacentage sets, may address each other by their ox-names, but ‘it would be presumptuous toaddress a much [more] senior man by his ox-name’ (!"#*: &&(). As in Vietnamese, so inNuer, there are many practices of address that convey status asymmetry betweenspeaker and recipient. Reciprocal use of ox-names, it would seem, is an alternative tothese in that this specifically conveys status equivalence – a relation of peers – for alimited set of consociates.

We suggest, then, that social order is built as much upon relations of parity andsameness – on identification of the other as neither higher nor lower than me – as it isupon relations of hierarchy, even as relations of parity may tend to elude the anthro-pological gaze. We have attempted to show the importance of such relations in alanguage community well known, if not famous, for its elaborate forms of socialhierarchy and corresponding speech practices that convey it. Our examples suggest thatthe problem of peers and friendship in Vietnam involves disattending to, obscuring,denying, or otherwise obviating the differences of age, status, rank, and so on, thatstructure the kinship system and that are inevitably implied by the use of kin termi-nology. We have tried to show here how in the Vietnamese context, a pervasiveorientation to and awareness of social hierarchy, rooted in a model of the extended,multi-generational family but mapped onto the social world as a whole, provides thebackdrop for the practices we have described. These practices can be seen to departfrom the presumption of hierarchy and social differentiation, but they do not so muchconvey equality or absolute parity as they imply the suspension of the ordinaryassumption of asymmetrical differentiation.



NOTESFor comments on an earlier version of this article we are grateful to audiences at the American Anthro-

pological Association Meetings in &$!$ and &$!!, especially Maurice Bloch, Sandro Duranti, Judy Irvine,Michael Lambek, Elinor Ochs, and Alan Rumsey. For comments on a written version we thank Nick Enfield,Michael Lempert, Hy Van Luong, and Alejandro Paz.

1 We use ‘address’ as a cover term to talk about instances of both second-person reference and whatlinguists describe as the vocative. In English, and many other languages, these two functions are associatedwith distinct forms, so we typically use pronouns for second-person reference (Hey John, you left the lighton!) and names, titles, and other ‘nouns’ for the vocative (Hey John, you left the light on!). Notice that in sucha system use of a name for second-person reference is highly marked and actually implies that the addresseeis a non-participant, third person. In Vietnamese the same forms (names, kin terms, etc.) are used for bothfunctions without any associated pragmatic inferences about participation status.

2 These forms convey such ‘meanings’ only indirectly and thus it is necessary to qualify here by saying, aswe do, ‘particular uses’. ‘Contempt’, for instance, is an inference that can be drawn from the use of the T-formin some particular contextual configuration, by some particular speaker, to some particular addressee. Inanother context the same form can convey a sense of ‘camaraderie’, and so on. This is token-level (as opposedto type-level) indexicality (see also Agha &$$').

3 This contrasts with the T-V systems so well described for European languages. In those languages thereis typically only one unmarked form for self-reference (the first-person singular pronoun, e.g. French je,German ich, etc., and its alternative case-forms), and, as such, its use does not convey differences ofspeaker-status relative to an addressee.

4 As Nick Enfield notes (pers. comm., !& March &$!&), one key point is that although it may be tempting toview the system as consisting of ‘I/you’ pairs, in fact each term has its independent meaning, and a certainchoice for ‘I’ does not fully entail a certain choice for ‘you’. A two-party exchange thus involves selection intwo directions and four terms: (!) A’s term of self-reference; (&) A’s term for addressing B; (() B’s term ofself-reference; and (*) B’s term for addressing A. Michael Lempert (pers. comm., ) December &$!&) alsopoints out that although it may be more common for a speaker to first select a term for addressing B, thussetting in motion a set of relevances that partially constrain or shape the subsequent selection of the otherthree terms, it is also possible for a speaker to begin an exchange with self-reference and no address, therebyestablishing a quite different set of relevances.

5 Luong contends that the last strategy is resorted to only with ‘an acute sense of rule violation’ (!""$: (',but see T.B.T. Nguyen &$$& and Shohet &$!$).

6 Such usages involve a transposition of the (indexical) origo or zero-point from which reference is made.Consider the case of three siblings below discussed by Luong (!""$: )'), where A is the oldest, B is youngerthan A but older than C, and C is the youngest. When in this situation A refers to B as anh (‘elder brother’),the origo or zero-point has been transposed from that of the speaker (A, for whom anh would refer to abrother older than he) to that of the recipient (C). (On the notion of transposition, see, inter alia, Bickel &$$!;Hanks !""$; Haviland !""#.)

7 We use the following abbreviations in the transcripts:

!s first-person singular pronoun&s second-person singular pronoun(s third-person singular pronounben benefactive case markercl nominal classifierconj conjunctionloc locativeneg negative markerprog progressive markervoc vocative particleq interrogative marker

8 See T.B.T. Nguyen (&$$&), Rydstrom (&$$(), and Shohet (&$!() on children’s socialization into theselinguistic forms in Northern and Central Vietnam.

9 Na and Li are the daughters of Vie· t’s maternal grandmother’s younger brother, and were frequent visitorsto the house where the interaction was filmed, since the two houses are separated by a mere dirt path and somebushes.Vie· t was also a frequent guest in this house,sometimes accompanied by his parents and younger brother(but not on this occasion). We use pseudonyms for the names of our informants here and below.



10 Use of zero signs (ellipsis) is clearly constrained by aspects of discourse and information structure. Muchhas been written about this issue with respect to English and other languages, but a detailed consideration ofthe factors that make zero reference in Vietnamese possible is beyond the scope of the present essay.

11 Vie· t’s use of the diminutive bé (little) in front of the name Li would be inappropriate were he strictlyadhering to the kinship frame in which he is technically the junior of the toddler; but since throughout thisstrip of interaction he positions himself as the senior of both girls, this usage is not inconsistent with his frame– albeit contested by Li’s older sister Na and, implicitly, by Vie· t’s older aunt Hong.

12 See, for example, Luong (!""&) and Rydstrom (&$$() on patrilineal norms and forms of action incolonial, Revolutionary, and late socialist Vietnam.

13 The use of sibling terms by marriage partners is a common areal pattern noted by Haas (!"#").14 As shall become evident, these asymmetries are geared to affirming, rather than disclaiming, various

degrees of intimacy among interlocutors, complicating any simplistic dichotomy that might posit hierarchyand equality as necessarily tied to social distance versus closeness, respectively.

15 The notion of ‘collateral effects’ in interaction was introduced by Sidnell and Enfield, who write, ‘[T]heselection of a linguistic structure based on one feature will inevitably introduce other features that give riseto what we shall refer to as collateral effects, that is, side-effects of the selection of a specific means for someends’ (&$!&: ($*).

16 Luong (!""$) suggests that tôi derives from an expression meaning ‘subject of the king’. On the use of tôiin Vietnamese writing, see Marr, who, in a discussion that in many ways resonates with our own (see below),writes: ‘As it turned out, tôi failed to achieve the status of moi or je in French, although it remains importantand can still be observed as a marker of individuality in certain circumstances. Sociolinguistically, tôi neededa second-person singular like vous to hook up with’ (&$$$: '%%).

17 In his study of a North Vietnamese village, Luong reports how the pairing of mày and tao were used,during the height of the Communist Revolution, to denounce persons classified as ‘landlords’ and to denyrelations of kinship among fathers and sons, leading, at times, to long-standing rifts within particular families(see especially !""&: !%").

18 Joking situations between friends under age *$, usually over the phone or at a café, were the mostcommon situations in which we observed use of the pronouns mày and tao (sometimes shortened andtransformed into to’). When questioned, participants explained that while these may be heard as ‘rude’, theyare the norm among friends of roughly the same age.

19 Since shaving one’s head often stands idiomatically for becoming a monk (and by implication, techni-cally a beggar), Tuan’s retort may be heard as ‘go be a monk/beggar’.

20 An alternate inference derivable from use of terms that do not encode this type of social relationship isthat the speakers are so close that the social relationship can be left implicit and uncoded – this seems to bethe case for the contemporary use of the pronouns mày/tao or reciprocal mình, as we discussed above.

21 Names can also be combined with kin terms, in which case the choice of using a person’s family name,given name, or nickname, for example, can index various gradations of hierarchy, as noted by Luong (!""$:%#-').

22 Alternatively, when addressing heterogeneous audiences in face-to-face situations, such as at temples orat public celebratory occasions, speakers often use the compound qúy vi· (‘honoured guests’), which indicatesa greater degree of formality and deference to the addressees than does the more indexically intimatecompound các ba· n.

23 Mình, which can be translated as ‘body’ or ‘oneself ’ in addition to ‘I’, tends to be more informal than tôi(commonly rendered as tui in the Southern dialect), and, as discussed earlier, can be used both for (self-)reference and for address.

24 Marr notes that this transformation in usage was perhaps unwittingly helped by the French, who usedcông dân for ‘citizens’ when levying taxes and enforcing colonial laws (!"%!: &#).

25 A similar logic may explain the lack of a literary substitute for the French-like vous described by Marr(&$$$: '%%), whereby authors were legitimated in adopting the term tôi to refer to themselves, but uncom-fortable in using an audience-demeaning term such as ngu’o’i (lit. person, but indexing the other’s inferiority)for generic address. Luong (!"%%) similarly describes a lack of neutral terms available for journalists todescribe personages and address their audiences in opinion pieces dating back to the !"($s, and the ways inwhich Marxist sympathizers used the system at hand to denigrate the colonizers – for which reasons theywere heavily censored.

26 Space limitations preclude a fuller discussion of the problems of gender and class in address in thisarticle, but we note that women’s adoption of the pronoun tôi, in place of the former con, em, or to’ (lit. child,younger sibling, or servant, respectively), also dates to the anti-Colonial era and the exhortations of Mme



Nguyen !u’c Nhua·n (Marr !"%!: &'; &$$$: '%') – evidencing women’s greater equality, but not full parity, withmen in everyday linguistic usage.

27 Co?n also sometimes uses ông to address Thua·n – see below.28 In a place like Vietnam where asymmetrical relationships imply not only obligations on the part of the

lower-status person (to pay respect to the higher-status person), but also obligations of generosity andbeneficence on the part of the higher-status person to the lower-status person (see Shohet &$!$; &$!(), use ofthe term ông may be a particularly effective (and insidious) means by which to encode these relations ofentitlement and obligation among persons who otherwise want to treat each other as peers.

29 This notion of kinship as rooted in ‘relatedness’ rather than strictly genealogical terms is fruitfullyexplored in Carsten (&$$$). See also Blum (!""') on the ways in which Chinese kinship terms, among othernaming practices, are deployed to establish moral relationships between interlocutors.

30 The authors continue,

If we review the actual cases in which strong affect occurs, it turns out that it is not the merepresence of the affect which is important but that the strong affect implies a relationship which isbasically different from the general conception of what uncle (aunt)-nephew (niece) should be.Where strong positive affect was indicated, the relationship seemed far more a relationship offriendship than of kinship. Uncles were described as being ‘pals,’ ‘close friends all my life’; ‘I’d gotalk over all my troubles with him, and we’d figure them out together.’ On the other hand, manyinformants reported real affection for an aunt or an uncle but this was seen as a special attributeof the particular kinship relation, of the relationship which normally should obtain between uncleand nephew rather than of a fundamentally different sort, as in the case of friendship.

Where uncles or aunts were designated by their first names alone, the relationship seemed to bepredominantly a person-to-person relationship, and whatever elements of kinship were implicit init were kept at an implicit level. Its primary tone was of person to person; ego was either very closeto or very hostile to him or her, as a person. Asked to describe why a particular uncle was not called‘uncle,’ an informant would dwell on the particular person’s personal qualities; he was mean,unpleasant, untrustworthy, etc. These are not the usual components of kinship relations. Similarly,on the other side, it was the personal qualities of,‘We get along well’ or,‘We like the same things’ thatwere cited in the cases where the affect was positive (Schneider & Homans !")): !&$$-!).

31 In the Southern dialect, kin terms such as anh can be used for third-party reference without beingsuffixed with ay, as is required in the Northern dialect.

32 In his earlier years, the leader took on the name Nguyen Aí Quoc, or Nguyen the Patriot, literallymeaning Nguyen Loves the Nation, further highlighting the importance of affect in relationships amongpersons and their polity, as well. And as noted earlier, although for a time Ho Chí Minh was elevated to thestatus of near-deity (see Luong !"%%), the relationship that Ho preferred to have with his subjects – as that ofpaternal uncle (bác) to his nieces and nephews (cháu) – has prevailed.

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Le problème des pairs dans les interactions en vietnamien

Résumé

En vietnamien, l’adresse prend typiquement la forme d’un terme de parenté, que l’interlocuteur soit ounon un parent généalogique. Tous les termes de parenté vietnamiens codent ainsi une référence à ladifférence d’âge ou de génération des participants. Il n’existe pas de termes réciproques similaires au« frère » ou « sœur » du français : le locuteur doit faire un choix entre « frère aîné » (anh) ou « frère cadet »(em). La génération impliquant normativement une différence d’âge, on obtient ainsi une indexationubiquiste des hiérarchies d’âge et de statut dans toutes les apostrophes. Et cela pose un problème pour lespairs : comment doivent-ils s’interpeller dans ce système (et faire référence à eux-mêmes) ? Le présentarticle décrit les différentes pratiques employées pour subvertir le système et éviter ainsi de pointer lesdifférences d’âge ou de statut, en mettant l’accent sur quatre d’entre elles : (!) l’utilisation de vrais pronomsdans l’adresse et la référence à soi ; (&) l’utilisation de noms propres dans l’adresse et la référence à soi ; (()l’usage de termes de parenté dans l’adresse et la référence à soi, et (*) l’usage ironique de termes de parentédans l’adresse. Les auteurs concluent que le système vietnamien illustre bien ce qui pourrait être unetension universelle entre hiérarchie et égalité dans les actes d’apostrophe et de référence à soi. Il montrecomment les locuteurs déconstruisent le vecteur de l’âge et indiquent qu’ils se considèrent comme pairs.Les auteurs suggèrent en outre que, bien que la littérature en la matière soit concentrée sur les manièresdont les langues donnent à percevoir les différences de statut et de rang, l’ordre social est tout autantconstruit sur des relations d’égalité et de similitude, sur l’identification de l’autre comme n’étant nisupérieur ni inférieur, que sur des relations hiérarchiques.

Jack Sidnell is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto with a cross-appointment tothe Department of Linguistics. His research focuses on the structures of talk and interaction. In addition toresearch in the Caribbean and Vietnam, he has examined talk in court and among young children. He is theauthor of Conversation analysis: an introduction (Blackwell, &$!$), the editor of Conversation analysis: com-parative perspectives (Blackwell, &$$"), and co-editor (with Makoto Hayashi and Geoffrey Raymond) ofConversational repair and human understanding (Cambridge University Press, &$!().

Merav Shohet serves as a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Toronto, and earned her Ph.D. atUCLA. Her research has focused on Vietnamese kinship, ethics, and sacrifice; children’s language socializa-tion; and health, mourning, ageing, and non-communicable diseases in Vietnam, and eating disorders,health, and well-being in North America. Recent publications include articles in American Anthropologist andEthos.

Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, "% Russell Street, Toronto, Ontario, M'S &S&, Canada.

[email protected]; [email protected]



The Problem of Peers in Vietnamese Interaction

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