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Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

I consulted for a Vietnamese tech company some years ago and was surprised to see that most internal emails among top management (most of whom had attended university overseas) were in English, rather than Vietnamese.

The reason? Written Vietnamese is too formal, and they prefer English for getting to the point quickly.

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I'm Vietnamese, some of us prefer English as it lack the formality for pronouns, those who have studied oversea are even more likely to use English in their daily conversation.

(interestingly, my friends point out that I seem to have different personality when using English instead of my mother language)

I am a native Slovenian speaker who speaks a bunch of different languages to varying degrees of "speak". I definitely feel each of them changes my personality somewhat in its own way.

I assume part of it is due the language used and part due to cultural traits you pick up when you learned it. Would be surprised if there was no feedback loop between language and cultures that use it.

> interestingly, my friends point out that I seem to have different personality when using English instead of my mother language

You may be interested in this thread from a few weeks back with numerous people testifying to that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13758623

I heard that South Korean airline pilots were required to speak in English while piloting so that copilots can let the command pilot know of dangerous situations. The formality in Korean would lock everyone into social roles that made it harder to have safe flights.

Two seperate Korean Air 747s have been piloted into the ground as a result of mistakes that went unchallenged due to the strict cultural power hierachy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Cargo_Flight_8509

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_801#After_th...

http://askakorean.blogspot.hk/2013/07/culturalism-gladwell-a... has a little bit of a different take on this - mainly aimed at Malcom Gladwell's _Outliers_ discussion of these incidents.

The article goes a bit broader and it's been a few years since I read it in depth, but you might be interested the counter-perspective.

That was an insanely long article that I don't want to read carefully, so I'm not gonna refute it, but I'll just say that as a Korean citizen I have absolutely no problem believing that "Korean workplace culture" inside Korean Air contributed to these accidents.

Yes, sure, if anyone claims that such a workplace culture is an inherent, inseparable part of Korean culture, then that's bollocks. But most people aren't saying that. We're just saying that there's a hierarchical culture problem widespread in Korea, right now. Which is absolutely true.

For a less tragic and more comical example of what the culture is like in Korean Air, look up the "Peanut turnaround incident" of 2014 (땅콩회항) which earned Korean Air the memorable nickname of "Peanut Air" (땅콩항공).

(...the nuts were actually macadamia nuts, but "Macadamia Nut Air" doesn't roll off the tongue as nicely.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nut_rage_incident

Here is a counter-counter-perspective: Gladwell twists the truth a bit to make a good story, however AskAKorean also twists the truth a bit to make a good refutation. Based on the transcript that AskAKorea posted, it's very clear that the first officer is acting deferentially to the pilot. Specifically, the first officer uses polite speech with the pilot, and the pilot uses familiar speech with the first officer. This indicates quite a big social status gap. As an example, in my company (I am working in Korea), neither my manager nor my manager's manager uses familiar speech with me, I'd have to go up 3 levels for that to start happening. What Gladwell mentioned in his book about hierarchy does not feel exaggerated, and there's likely a large grain of truth to Gladwell's representation of what happened. Also, if you look through AskAKorean's previous blogs, you can notice a fairly nationalistic streak in his posts, which may explain his strong opinions regarding Gladwell's assertions.

I find this explanation for their choice hard to believe.

I live in Vietnam, speak Vietnamese, and see millions of people post not-formal, to-the-point things on Facebook and Instagram every day.

Oh, don't be daft. You're comparing the way people act and speak on Facebook with how they are expected to act in a formal setting such as work?

Totally different ball game.

Maybe I should rethink how informal I speak at work. Or how formal I speak to my friends.

I absolutely think there are people where there's a huge gap and others where it's hardly noticeable ;)

What do you mean by formal?

I’ve always assumed Asian languages to be very informal as a lot of it has to do with context. At least that’s how some of my friends talk to each other. And one of the reasons why it’s so hard to blend in. It could also be possible that they rarely talk formally in person, and I’ve yet to experience it.

At least with Korean and Japanese, they are highly formal as they have different conjugations depending on the level of the person you're speaking to.

With Korean, spoken language among roughly same-age friends is informal, of course. But if someone is older, then there's a different ending, unless you know them well enough to speak in informal language.

If you're speaking to your boss there's a different level of formality, and people like your grandparents get honorifics which are also conjugated, but alongside with formality.

It also reinforces social pressures of obeying your boss/elders, which stem from Korea's roots in Confucianism/Neo-Confuncianism.

It's no wonder people like to use English sometimes.

When it comes to written language, there are formal and informal styles. I am a Mandarin speaker and can read texts and social media pretty well because it follows many spoken conventions. But I have great difficulty with the styles employed in most Chinese newspapers. It's not just the vocabulary, there are written conventions that I don't hear in conversational settings. One exception: The Apple Daily (蘋果日報) which uses a different written style for headlines, infographics, and body text. It's less formal, more colloquial, and easier to understand.

> I’ve always assumed Asian languages to be very informal as a lot of it has to do with context.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, but if you're thinking about "East Asian languages omitting 'necessary' grammatical parts all the time", then you might be talking about this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-drop_language

Note that this is a grammatical phenomenon exhibited by some languages (i.e., the characteristics of a language as a whole). Formality/informality is a concept associated with a particular "speech" inside a language, which is orthogonal to this. (You can say a particular speech in English is formal or informal, but it makes little sense to say that "English" as a whole is a formal or informal language.)

Interesting. I’ve mistakenly assumed that there is a relative difference between formal and informal counterparts. Considering the extreme informality of Eastern Asian languages, I didn’t think their formal language was on the opposite end of the spectrum.

On the contrary, both Chinese and Japanese are very formal as to the written. Ancient Chinese has a high bar between formally written and oral ones. In recent centuries the difference got smaller, but there is still a big difference. On the plus side, most Chinese write emails colloquially.

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