Who guards the hometown accent?

That was when I realized the pronunciation difference of the region, and laughed with him, finding it both charming and delightful.

Another time, in Quang Tri, I was drinking with a group of friends and could barely understand a word they said! But the warmth, the humor, the naturalness of it made me laugh nonstop. It reminded me of my days in Canada, where my army buddies each had their own regional accent. Especially the "Newfies" from Newfoundland, when they talked among themselves, only they could understand, but we all found it endlessly funny.

That story from Thai Binh made me think about the issue of 'l' and 'n' pronunciation that the Vietnamese education ministry now wants to fix.

Why not start with Quang Tri first! From a Canadian's point of view, that accent chirps and flutters like bluejays, especially after a few beers.

But that's exactly what worries me most: it's a dangerous fallacy. Once you open the door to regulating how others speak, you may never close it again.

At first glance, the idea of "correcting" something to bring it back to its "original" form might sound good, but I think that's a mistake. Dialects exist across Vietnam. All evidence shows that languages are constantly changing.

Language reform plans almost never succeed in North America, simply because we don't believe any accent is nobler than another. From a critical-thinking standpoint, all ideas stand equal if they rest on sound reasoning. Over-standardization comes from bureaucratic thinking: "Put a hammer in the office, and someone will try to standardize even nails." Everything must follow procedure, even dialects. In truth, linguistic drift is not decay, it's expansion, adaptation, growth. Language evolves to serve its speakers. It is a living tool, not a fossil to be preserved intact.

And this brings us back to education, and one of my long-standing wishes: we need less paperwork, less test-driven conformity, and more encouragement and joy in learning.

Students raise their boards in a Vietnamese language class at Dinh Tien Hoang Primary School in Ho Chi Minh City, September 2023. Photo by VnExpress/Quynh Tran

I learned the northern Vietnamese accent simply because I liked it, like many foreigners do. The 'z' sound is clear and easy to mimic. Later, I fell in love with the gentleness of the southern accent. What helped me was not correction, it was encouragement. Encouragement carries us like water downstream, just as rivers naturally flow to the sea.

One of the most fascinating traits of Vietnamese is how it handles time. According to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, grammar is the operating system of the mind, and in Vietnamese, that system treats time very differently.

In English, time is sliced into rigid tenses, I went, I go, I will go, like train tickets that cannot be exchanged. In Vietnamese, you just say "tôi đi hôm qua" (I went yesterday), "mai tôi đi" (I go tomorrow), or simply "tôi đi," and context handles the rest.

To English speakers, that might seem like a "system error." But to Vietnamese, it's natural, even elegant. Time here flows like a river, marked only by a few stones, yesterday, today, tomorrow, without twisting verbs. That flexibility even shapes thought itself: people live more in the present, less trapped by the cages of past, present, and future.

Try telling an uncle at a drinking table that you "will have been going" somewhere. He'll just chuckle: "Too many opinions, Jesse! Drink up!"

From Proto-Viet to Chinese borrowings, from Nom to the Romanized Quoc Ngu alphabet, from French to English influence, the history of Vietnamese has always been a story of adaptation. That's why trying to "fix" linguistic drift is not only impossible but counterproductive. Any language that resists change too rigidly ends up choking itself.

The river of language doesn't just erode, it nourishes, divides, and creates new meanings.

Or, as a future Vietnamese proverb might say: "Markets can be closed, rivers can be dammed, but words can't be banned."

*Jesse Peterson is an author who has published some books in Vietnamese, including "Jesse Cười", "Funny Tragedy: adding color to life".