Standard Language Ideology and the Construction of Northern Accent Prestige in Vietnamese Media

This study examined how Northern-accent prestige was constructed and naturalized in Vietnamese national television news and current-affairs programming. Rather than treating the elevated status of Northern speech as the self-evident result of linguistic clarity, the study approached standard pronunciation as an ideological and institutional achievement. It drew on critical discourse analysis, standard language ideology, and Bourdieu's concept of linguistic capital to examine a documented online pilot sample from four VTV1 programs: Thời sự 19h, Chuyển động 24h, Việt Nam hôm nay, and Vấn đề hôm nay. Comparison across program formats distinguished the concentration of standard-oriented speech in studio authority roles from the more heterogeneous voices heard in field reports and interviews. The analysis identified five mechanisms through which prestige was reproduced: institutional selection of the anchor voice; association of Northern-oriented pronunciation with seriousness, education, and national authority; framing of regional accents as local testimony rather than universal narration; correction and self-monitoring organized around clarity and professionalism; and repetition that converted a historically located variety into an apparently accent-less national norm. The analysis argues that Vietnamese television does not merely reflect a pre-existing hierarchy among accents. Through role allocation, scripting, editing, visual framing, and metalinguistic evaluation, it helped produce the Northern-oriented broadcast voice as the legitimate voice of public knowledge. Accent prestige was strongest where speakers-controlled topic definition, transition, interpretation, and closure, whereas regional diversity was most audible in short field-based testimony. The comparison further suggests that the distinction between a national voice and a regional voice depended not only on pronunciation but also on program genre, speaker role, and institutional positioning. The study therefore shifted attention from phonological difference to the discursive production of prestige and proposed a format-sensitive framework for examining accent hierarchy in institutional media. It concluded that a shared professional register could support national intelligibility without requiring regional conformity, provided that broadcasters separated communicative competence from inherited assumptions about the sound of authority.

standard language ideology; Northern Vietnamese; accent prestige; media discourse; linguistic capital; language variation; television news; Vietnam

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