American Council of Learned Societies which, through the Intensive Language Program, made possible work with the major informant in 1943; to the Linguistic Institute of 1943, held at the University of Wisconsin, where the work of analysis was begun; and to the administrative officers of the University of California at Berkeley, for much smoothing of the way throughout the whole period of the work. I especially owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Diether von den Steinen for putting at my disposal his deep knowledge of Chinese, and for much aid in grammatical analysis; and to the two Vietnamese speakers named in the following paragraphs, especially to the major informant, Mr. Lâm, whose ingenuity and patience were never-failing and who wrote for us extremely useful text material. Teaching material was prepared for the course and was produced by the "ditto" process in two volumes: M. B. Emeneau and Diether von den Steinen, A Course in Annamese, and Lý-đức-Lâm, M. B. Emeneau, and Diether von den Steinen, An Annamese Reader. The vocabularies from these two volumes were later combined in another dittoed volume, An Annamese-English Dictionary, by M. B. Emeneau and Diether von den Steinen. Later, a manuscript, "An Annamese Beginning Book," was prepared by revision of the teaching material, but it has not been published.
The major informant in the work was the above-mentioned speaker from Vinh, Mr. Lý-đức-Lâm. From the age of three years he lived at Hà-tĩnh (in his pronunciation, Hà-tịnh), and from the age of twelve he went to school at Vinh. His schooling was extensive in French, and his knowledge of written Vietnamese is likewise thorough. This poses the problem of the exact nature of the dialect that was studied. It became clear, as soon as a second informant was obtained, that the latter, from Tonkin, spoke a representative Tonkinese dialect and that Lâm's dialect presented differences. Reports from several of the Army students who spent some time in Indo-China at the end of the war with Japan were to the effect that their knowledge of the language was recognized by the Vietnamese as having been obtained from a man from Vinh. It is at least possible, then, that Lâm's dialect, as it was recorded, is to some extent that obtaining in Vinh, though it would not be at all surprising if his local dialect had been modified considerably by the written language, in which he is so thoroughly at home. Research on the point in Indo-China would be desirable. However, it is unlikely that grammatical differences would be found, and I feel fairly sure that Lâm's pronunciation is really representative of Vinh. Cadière's account makes it probable that the major differences would be lexical; that is, the uninfluenced Vinh dialect probably has many local words that differ from those of the written language.
The second speaker, Mr. Trän-xuân-Bá (more commonly known as Ba, "three"), lived as a child and went to school in Nam-định in the southern part of the Tonkinese delta. His dialect is representative of that locality and probably, in a broad way, of most of Tonkin. The major differences between his dialect and that of Lâm were recorded. They are mainly matters of phonology: Lâm's dialect is "archaic" in having two consonant phonemes more than Ba's, but less archaic in its smaller number of examples of the creaky level tone. Some differences of lexicon and of usage were also recorded, but these differences are minimal.
