How to speak to the masses, part one: Ho Chi Minh's instructions to cadres and the dynamics of register formation in 20th century Vietnam

The question of how to understand the relation between language and action lies at the heart of both philosophical pragmatics and linguistic anthropology. This same question, although framed in a very different way, also emerged as a basic concern for communist revolutionaries in Vietnam in the mid 1940s and, I contend, continues to exercise the imagination of party members and others up until the present day. Drawing inspiration from Asif Agha's definition of a (semiotic) register as a cultural model of action, in this essay, I consider the ways in which H. Chi Minh along with other high-ranking party members sought to reform Vietnamese through a project of register formation, and thereby to transform the language into an effective instrument of mass mobilization. I suggest that this project centrally involved reconceptualizing the relationship between language and action and was pursued by, on the one hand, identifying and proscribing ways of speaking in which the connection with action was seen to be broken such that speech amounted to mere words and, on the other, by promoting a way of speaking in which, as the frequently used Vietnamese expression has it, speaking goes hand-in-hand with doing (noi di doi voi lam).

Automated summary

This essay explores how the question of the relationship between language and action is understood in the context of language reform by Vietnamese communist revolutionaries. It suggests that reconfiguring the language-action relationship is achieved through identifying and proscribing disconnected speech and promoting speech that is aligned with action.