French language in Vietnam

Common card · No. 441741

French was the official language of Vietnam under French colonial rule from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries. After the 1954 partition of the country, French fell into disuse in North Vietnam, and maintained a high status in South Vietnam. Since the Fall of Saigon after 1975, French has greatly declined in present-day Vietnam: in 2018, slightly under 1% of the population was fluent in French. However, since the turn of the 21st century, the language has undergone a slight revival, with a growth in number of speakers and institutional use. Vietnam is the largest Francophone country in Asia and is a member of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF). Since the 1990s, the Vietnamese government in cooperation with the French government, has promoted French-language education in the country's schooling system, acknowledging the cultural and historic value of the French language. Most notably, French is the only language besides Vietnamese used as a medium at all grade levels...

Read on Wikipedia · Image RG72, CC BY-SA 4.0