Asean from a geolinguistic perspective

• Main Author: Dinh Van Duc
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: H. : ĐHQGHN 2017
• Online Access: http://repository.vnu.edu.vn/handle/VNU_123/57883
• Institution: Vietnam National University, Hanoi

The paper focuses on the following: 1. Geolinguistics addresses the mixture and distribution of languages from a geographical perspective that is always associated with economy, population and society. A geolinguistic perspective, therefore, can shed m ore light on the specificities of a certain socio-politicai space in existence an d development. Such is the case with ASEAN. 2. ASEAN originally (1967) w as a political alliance for m ilitary confrontation. Regional and intern ational political changes in the last few decades have gradually turned it into analliance of partners for economy and security of the whole area of South East Asia. Geolinguistically, however, this space is rather special: it is more diverse than uniformed, more divergent than convergent. ASEAN comprises two groups of countries: those on land and on islands; their populations are accordingly varied. Geographical influences from China and India result in apparen teconomic and cultural consequences, and the language map show sobvious geographical segregation, which provides almost no grounds for assembly and linkages. 3. Unlike African, Latin American, Carribean and Arabic communities which have alw ays had very close geographical and linguistic linkages, South East Asian space, both in history and at present, has seen more distinctions than uniform ity in their languages in terms of structure; and their inter-contacts have brought about different conceptualizations as well as practices of language policies in order to harm onize various interests for development. 4. Geo-regionalism in language contact also has created cultural counter-flows - the invasion of the Sanskrit writing system from the Indian sub-continent and the squarish Sino characters from the Chinese continent, and later the forccd contact with English, French, Dutch and Spanish brought along by colonialism. 5. It is difficult to find am ong the native languages a common, popular language for ASEAN in the future. T he existence of cultural gaps underlying the language distribution is also of im portance and interest. 6. The paper concludes with forecasts of language trends which may streng then in the geographical region of ASEAN.