The Art of Avoiding Offense: A Contrastive Analysis of Euphemisms in Vietnamese and American Culture

Thu Ba Hoang

Published: 2026/06/01

Abstract

The study examines euphemistic usage in Vietnamese and American English dialogues to elucidate underlying cultural factors and enhance cross-cultural understanding. A theoretical framework is employed that categorizes euphemisms by semantic expression: synonyms, negation, and indirect expressions. The research used a mixed descriptive method with a dataset of 350 instances drawn from 150 media communicative dialogues. A chi-square test approached but did not reach conventional significance (χ²(2) = 5.96, p = .051), with a small-to-moderate effect size (Cramér’s V = .199), suggesting directional cross-cultural differences warranting further investigation with larger corpora. The higher prevalence of synonyms in Vietnamese (39.47% vs. 21.62%) aligns with high-context communication norms and Vietnamese values prioritizing hierarchy and face-saving, while American English’s greater use of negation (13.51% vs. 7.89%) reflects low-context, individualistic communicative preferences. Qualitative analysis further reveals that Vietnamese indirect expressions draw on shared ancestral and cosmological scripts, whereas American English equivalents are constructed to be interpretable without cultural pre-knowledge. Theoretically, this study extends contrastive euphemism research to an underexplored language pairing, documents the capacity of shared cultural knowledge to enable novel euphemistic constructions in high-context communication — a qualitative dimension of cross-cultural difference consistent with Hall’s (1976) framework — and draws on Gricean maxims to clarify the pragmatic status of negation-based euphemisms. Practically, the findings offer paedagogical implications for language education and intercultural communication training.

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