Today I also found some texts that were used to teach the Vietnamese language to ethnic minorities in South Vietnam. This one is for the Cham, but there were other versions for other ethnic groups.
Southern Illinois University played a role in creating these materials.
This text has Vietnamese at the beginning.
And Cham translations at the back of the text.
I particularly like the above two images.
“Má tí về nhà,
“Ba tí về nhà,
“. . . nhưng thầy u ở dâu?!”
Wow’! Anh Khai biet ca “thay u” a? It looks like the materials you mentioned here tended to promote Southern vocabularies. I wonder why this was the case because there were a large population of Northerners living in the South who would refer to their parents as ‘bo me’ or ‘thay u’ as you said here :).
So the Cham only learned one variety of Vietnamese 😉 through these textbooks, I guess.
Exactly! It’s the old story of language and political power. . . 😉