THE ISSUES OF SPOKEN LANGUAGE AND WRITING SYSTEM OF ETHNIC MINORITIES IN VIETNAM IN ANTHROPOLOGY TRAINING AND RESEARCH (The case of ancient written materials of the Cham)

Abstract

The Cham in Vietnam have possessed a writing system for ages. Basing on Sanskrit and Arabian characters, they created many different characters to record issues related to their history, culture, religion, custom, and so on. As a result, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, foreign researchers doing research on their history and civilization paid close attention to reading and exploring the Cham’s ancient written materials. However, in Vietnam, seldom is there any scholar, particularly in anthropology and ethnology, being interested in this issue. This is in fact a barrier to Vietnamese anthropologists and ethnologists who attempt to scientifically and intensively study on the Cham culture. This paper presents the current situation of exploring the Cham’s ancient written materials in Vietnam in order to propose some solutions for the training of the Cham language in particular, and of ethnic minority languages in general for the sake of anthropology training and research in Vietnam.