proto-southwestern-tai revised: a new reconstruction - seals 22

A NOTE ON INTERFERENCE OF THAI REDUPLICATION
ON VIETNAMESE SPOKEN IN UDON THANI PROVINCE
OF THAILAND
Songgot Paanchiangwong
University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Hanoi National University
1. Introduction
Udon Thani, a province in the northeast of Thailand, has the biggest Vietnamese
community in Thailand (Sophana: 2005, 10). These Vietnamese immigrants numbering
around 46,700 people came from Northern, Cental and Southern regions of Vietnam in
1945 because of World War II (Khachatphai: 1978, 10). At the present time, there are three
generations of Vietnamese immigrants living in Udon Thani Province. They still
communicate with each other in Vietnamese, even though some of them are now living
outside the community. They live in the Thai language society and they work with Thais,
so they need to learn the Thai language as a means of communication. It can be said that
the Thai language is involved directly in their daily life, not only when they work outside
their community but also in their own family.
Consequently, linguistic interference has occurred in respect of quantitative
intensification in Vietnamese, patterning after Thai reduplication. This is documented in
this paper.
2. Definition of Interference
Various scholars have offered definitions of interference:
Weinreich (1953) defines two languages as being in contact if they are used
alternately by the same speakers. Deviation from the language norms as a result of contact
is called interference. Weinreich suggests that in speech, interference is like sand carried
by a stream; in language, interference is the sedimentary sand deposited on the bottom of a
lake.
Barkman (1968) says that whenever a bilingual speaker produces a form in a
language which monolingual speakers of that language would not use, either as a result of
identification or for other reasons, a case of interference has occurred.
Briere (1968) notes that interference occurs when a speaker of language X attempts
to learn language Y. This interference has been attributed to the fact that between any two
languages there are similarities and differences on all levels of analysis. The degree of
interference would ensue from the partial similarity or difference between the two
completing categories, one in the learner’s native language and the other in the target
language.
Mackey (1972) defines interference as the use of features belonging to one
language while speaking or writing another. Mackey regards not only speaking but also
writing as having interference. If the text analyzed, however, is not based on the spoken,
but on the written form of the language, we will have to look for evidence of another sort
Songgot Paanchianwong. 2009. A Note on Interference of Thai Reduplication on Vietnamese Spoken in
Udon Thani Province of Thailand. Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society 2:241-245.
Copyright vested in the author.
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