LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF VIETNAMESE LEGAL LANGUAGE:

A CORPUS STUDY OF COURT DOCUMENTS (2020–2024)

Đỗ Phương Lâm, PhD

Hai Phong University

171 Phan Dang Luu, Kien An, Hai Phong, Vietnam

Email: dolamdhhp@gmail.com

26 March 2026

Abstract

This article systematically examines the linguistic features of Vietnamese legal texts, drawing on a corpus of 150 court documents — criminal verdicts, civil judgments, administrative rulings, and decisions of the Supreme Court's Judicial Council — published between 2020 and 2024 (approximately 510,000 tokens). Unlike previous studies on Vietnamese legal language, which focused either on lexical errors in court documents (Nguyễn Thị Lệ 2011) or on terminology in statutory texts (Đào Thanh Lan 2015; Phan Văn Hòa 2018), this study treats court documents as an independent genre and analyses them from three dimensions: (1) vocabulary — Sino-Vietnamese terminology, internal register-switching, and formulaic language; (2) genre structure — an eight-move obligatory schema, identified here for the first time in Vietnamese court documents, using the Swales–Bhatia genre theory; and (3) pragmatics — performative speech acts, subject anonymisation as a power strategy, epistemic modality gradience, and a four-group system of legal euphemism serving distinct legal principles. The findings contribute to Vietnamese legal linguistics theory and have practical applications in legal education, public legal communication, and legal translation.

Keywords: legal language, court documents, genre analysis, legal euphemism, power in discourse, Vietnamese legal linguistics

1. Purpose of the Research

Legal language (legilect) designates the variety of natural language employed in legal documents, proceedings, and institutions — including statutes, decrees, contracts, and court judgments. As a specialised functional variety, it combines features shared with other formal registers (administrative precision, normative force) with properties found nowhere else: absolute lexical precision, deontically binding formulations, and a direct link between linguistic choice and legal effect.

Within the broader system of legal texts, court documents — particularly judgments and decisions of the Judicial Council — occupy a distinctive position. They are not merely procedural outputs: they constitute case law (án lệ in Vietnamese), directly shaping the rights and obligations of the parties and guiding future adjudication. This dual status imposes contradictory demands on the language: it must be sufficiently precise to carry legal validity, yet sufficiently transparent for citizens to understand rulings that affect them.

The purpose of this article is to provide a systematic, corpus-based description of the linguistic features of Vietnamese court documents in the period 2020–2024, with the aim of: (a) establishing a theoretically grounded characterisation of Vietnamese legal language as an independent genre; (b) identifying features that are language- or system-specific, including those arising from the Sino-Vietnamese lexical layer and the socialist civil-law tradition; and (c) providing a descriptive framework applicable to legal education, legal drafting quality assurance, public legal communication, and legal translation.

2. Scope of the Research

The present study focuses exclusively on court documents produced by the Vietnamese court system in the period 2020–2024. This scope excludes statutory texts (codes, decrees, circulars) and prosecutorial documents (indictments), although reference is made to findings on those text types where relevant for comparison.

Geographically and institutionally, the corpus draws on documents from courts at all levels — district, provincial, appellate, and the Supreme Court — published on the official Supreme People's Court database (congbobanan.toaan.gov.vn). The time frame was chosen deliberately: it postdates the formal introduction of the Vietnamese case-law system (án lệ) in 2016, allowing observation of how the expectation of more elaborate judicial reasoning has begun to affect the language of court documents.

Three analytical dimensions are addressed: (1) lexical features of the legal vocabulary, including Sino-Vietnamese terminology, internal register-switching, and formulaic language; (2) genre structure, applying Swales–Bhatia move analysis to four sub-types of court document; (3) pragmatic strategies, including performative language, subject anonymisation, epistemic modality gradience, and legal euphemism.

3. Methods / Methodology

3.1 Theoretical Framework

The study integrates three complementary theoretical perspectives, each selected for its relevance to the specific properties of Vietnamese court documents:

(i) Genre analysis (Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993): court documents are treated as instances of a recognisable, institutionally stabilised genre whose communicative purposes are realised through a structured sequence of rhetorical moves. The Swales–Bhatia framework provides the analytical apparatus for Move 2 of the analysis (genre structure).

(ii) Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1989, 2003; van Dijk 1997): the power relations inscribed in legal language — particularly the strategies of subject anonymisation and the naturalisation of institutional authority — are analysed as discourse strategies connecting the micro-level of linguistic choice to the macro-level of institutional ideology.

(iii) Speech Act Theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1969): court documents are analysed as a chain of performative utterances that do not merely describe legal reality but constitute it. This framework underpins the pragmatic analysis in Section 6.

3.2 Corpus

The corpus was compiled from the Supreme People's Court's official public database. Table 1 provides a summary of the sub-corpora.

Table 1. Court Document Corpus (2020–2024)

Code	Document Type	N (docs)	Tokens (~)	Sampling Criteria
NL1	Criminal verdicts (1st instance, appeal, cassation review)	50	180,000	Diverse offences, sentencing ranges, courts from all regions
NL2	Civil judgments (contract disputes, land, family)	50	160,000	Both 1st instance and appeal; with and without cross-appeals
NL3	Administrative rulings (challenges to administrative acts)	30	90,000	Diverse sectors: land, construction, tax, social insurance
NL4	Cassation decisions / Judicial Council rulings (VSCJ), case law	20	80,000	Includes case law (án lệ) formally endorsed by the Judicial Council
Total		150	510,000

Note. GĐT = cassation review; HĐTP = Judicial Council; QĐHC = administrative decision; HVHC = administrative act; HN–GĐ = marriage and family.

The corpus totals approximately 510,000 tokens (running words) and represents all four major document types in the Vietnamese court system. Sampling aimed for typological diversity: across offence categories and sentencing levels (NL1), contested legal issues and levels of jurisdiction (NL2 and NL3), and the range of grounds for cassation review (NL4). Documents were collected in their original format and processed without anonymisation for linguistic analysis purposes; all examples cited below are drawn from publicly accessible judicial database records.

3.3 Analytical Procedure

The analysis followed three sequential phases. In the first phase, the full corpus was read to identify recurring lexical items, formulaic patterns, and structural segments. In the second phase, Move analysis (Swales 1990) was applied to a stratified sub-set of 60 documents (15 per sub-type) to identify the obligatory and optional moves in each document type and to construct the genre schemas presented in Section 5. In the third phase, pragmatic features — performatives, anonymisation strategies, modality gradience, and euphemism — were identified, classified, and exemplified using natural examples from the corpus. Quantitative estimates (e.g., Sino-Vietnamese terminology density) are based on manual counts in a random 10% sample of each sub-corpus, corroborated by keyword-in-context searches using AntConc 4.2 (Anthony 2022).

4. State-of-the-Art Findings: Literature Review

4.1 International Research on Legal Language

Legal linguistics has a substantial international tradition. Mellinkoff (1963) provided the first systematic description of English legal language, identifying its characteristic features: archaic vocabulary, loan words, long sentences, and purposive ambiguity. Tiersma (1999) remains the most comprehensive treatment of American-English legal language, covering the full register from statutory texts to court judgments. Bhatia (1993) applied genre theory to English-language legal documents, laying the groundwork for treating the court judgment as an independent genre with analysable move structure. Gibbons (2003) extended the analysis to the courtroom as a site of language interaction, contributing the discourse-analytic strand of forensic linguistics. More recent contributions by Mazzi (2010) on judicial argumentation and Goźdź-Roszkowski (2011) on phraseology in legal texts have refined the description of genre-specific lexicogrammar.

For comparative legal linguistics, Cao (2007) provides a systematic account of the challenges of legal translation across legal systems, with particular attention to the gap between common law and civil law conceptual structures — directly relevant to the Vietnamese case. Šarčević (1997) examines the communicative functions of legal texts and offers a genre-based translation theory. Garre (1999) and Mattila (2013) address the development of legal terminology in European continental systems, providing a benchmark for assessing Sino-Vietnamese terminology in comparative perspective.

In Asian legal linguistics, research on Chinese legal language (Liu Hongliang 2003; Li Zhenyu 2016) shows structural and terminological parallels with Vietnamese that arise from the shared Sino-Vietnamese lexical heritage and the shared socialist civil-law tradition. Kurzon (1986, 2001) and Foley (1997) have addressed performativity in legal texts in ways that inform the analysis of Vietnamese court language in Section 6.

4.2 Research on Vietnamese Legal Language: Assessment and Positioning

Research on Vietnamese legal language remains limited and has developed along four separate lines. The first line examines the language of administrative-legal documents in general. Lê Xuân Thại (2010) and Nguyễn Văn Thành (2007) survey stylistic and structural features of government documents at large — statutes, decrees, administrative decisions — without focusing on court documents as a distinct sub-genre.

The second line addresses legal terminology. Đào Thanh Lan (2015) and Phan Văn Hòa (2018) analyse the properties of Vietnamese legal terms, primarily in statutory texts (codes and laws) rather than court documents. These studies are most directly relevant to the vocabulary analysis in Section 5 of the present article; the findings are taken up and extended to court-document data.

The third line examines lexical errors in court documents. Nguyễn Thị Lệ (2011) identified and classified three types of word-use errors in Vietnamese court documents: wrong forms of address, redundant or obscure wording, and semantic errors. This pioneering study takes a prescriptive approach — identifying and recommending corrections — and is thus complementary to, rather than overlapping with, the present descriptive-systemic analysis.

The fourth line applies discourse analysis to prosecutorial texts. Nguyễn Thị M. Trang (2024) uses Appraisal Theory (Martin and White 2005) to analyse Vietnamese indictments — a different text type with different communicative purposes. This study provides a useful methodological reference but concerns a different moment in the criminal process (prosecution, not adjudication) and a text oriented to persuasion rather than ruling.

The review reveals three consistent gaps: (a) no prior study has examined all four major types of court document simultaneously; (b) genre-analysis and CDA frameworks have not been applied to Vietnamese court documents; (c) no study draws on corpus data from the post-2016 period, when the án lệ (case-law) system began to influence judicial drafting. These gaps define the contribution of the present article.

5. Vocabulary: Findings

5.1 Sino-Vietnamese Terminology: The Foundational Lexical Layer

Sino-Vietnamese (Hán Việt) terms constitute the dominant layer of legal vocabulary in court documents, at a density measurably higher than in statutory texts — a finding consistent with Đào Thanh Lan (2015) and Phan Văn Hòa (2018) for statutes, but now extended to court documents, which must activate both substantive law and procedural law terminology simultaneously. Four functional classes can be identified:

(a) Procedural participant terms: bị cáo (defendant in criminal proceedings), bị đơn (defendant in civil proceedings), nguyên đơn (claimant/plaintiff), bị hại (victim), người có quyền lợi và nghĩa vụ liên quan (interested third party), Hội đồng xét xử (bench; panel), Kiểm sát viên (procurator), Hội thẩm nhân dân (people's assessor). Each term encodes a single legal status tied to a specific procedural stage: bị can (investigation stage) ≠ bị cáo (trial stage). As Nguyễn Thị Lệ (2011) documented, confusion between these near-synonyms constitutes a serious lexical error in drafting practice.

(b) Core legal-conceptual nouns: pháp nhân (legal person), quyền nhân thân (personal right), nghĩa vụ dân sự (civil obligation), bồi thường thiệt hại (compensation for damage), tình tiết tăng nặng/giảm nhẹ (aggravating/mitigating circumstance), kháng cáo/kháng nghị (appeal/protest by procurator), phúc thẩm/giám đốc thẩm/tái thẩm (appeal review/cassation review/retrial), thời hiệu (limitation period), thẩm quyền xét xử (jurisdictional competence).

(c) Performative legal verbs: tuyên phạt (sentence), truy tố (prosecute), xét xử (adjudicate), bác bỏ (dismiss), chấp nhận (uphold), hủy bỏ (quash), sửa đổi (amend), đình chỉ (terminate proceedings), áp dụng (apply [law]), viện dẫn (cite [authority]), căn cứ vào (pursuant to), chiếu theo (in accordance with). This class is particularly important because these verbs create legal reality when uttered in the appropriate institutional context (see Section 6.1).

(d) Binary legal adjectives: hợp pháp/bất hợp pháp (lawful/unlawful), có hiệu lực/hết hiệu lực (in force/expired), đúng pháp luật/trái pháp luật (legally correct/contrary to law), cố ý/vô ý (intentional/negligent), có căn cứ/không có căn cứ (well-founded/unfounded). The binary structure of these pairs reflects the fundamentally dichotomous logic of adjudication — guilty/not guilty, right/wrong — a feature shared with legal adjective systems in French and German legal language (Mattila 2013), though the specific Sino-Vietnamese lexical form is language-specific.

The following examples from the corpus illustrate the density of Sino-Vietnamese terminology:

(1) Bị cáo Nguyễn Văn A phạm tội 'Giết người' theo quy định tại Điều 123 Bộ luật hình sự năm 2015 (sửa đổi, bổ sung năm 2017). [The defendant Nguyễn Văn A committed the offence of 'Murder' as defined in Article 123 of the Penal Code 2015 (as amended in 2017).] (Criminal verdict, Hanoi People's Court, 2022)

(2) Căn cứ vào tình tiết tăng nặng trách nhiệm hình sự quy định tại điểm g khoản 1 Điều 52 BLHS: 'Phạm tội có tổ chức'. [Pursuant to the aggravating circumstance of criminal liability prescribed in point g, clause 1, Article 52 of the Penal Code: 'Offence committed in an organised manner'.] (Criminal verdict, Bac Ninh People's Court, 2023)

5.2 Internal Register-Switching: Sino-Vietnamese and Vernacular Vietnamese in Co-Occurrence

A distinctive — and previously unrecorded — feature of Vietnamese court documents is what we term internal register-switching (or internal bilingualism): within a single sentence or paragraph, the text alternates between Sino-Vietnamese technical terminology (in the legal-analytical sections) and colloquial/vernacular Vietnamese (in the narrative-of-facts sections). This boundary demarcates two distinct functions within the same document:

(3) Bị cáo khai nhận: vào hồi 21 giờ ngày 15 tháng 3 năm 2022, bị cáo đã dùng dao nhọn đâm nhiều nhát vào người của bị hại Nguyễn Thị D. Hành vi của bị cáo đã cấu thành tội phạm quy định tại khoản 2 Điều 134 BLHS về tội 'Cố ý gây thương tích'. [The defendant testified: at around 21:00 on 15 March 2022, the defendant used a sharp knife to stab the victim Nguyễn Thị D. multiple times. The defendant's conduct constitutes the offence prescribed in clause 2, Article 134 of the Penal Code, the offence of 'Intentional infliction of bodily harm'.] (Criminal verdict, Hai Phong People's Court, 2023)

In example (3), the narrative section ('used a sharp knife to stab multiple times') employs ordinary, accessible Vietnamese — the narrative function; the legal conclusion ('constitutes the offence', 'Intentional infliction of bodily harm') switches to technical Sino-Vietnamese — the normative function. The boundary between the two registers is simultaneously the boundary between factual reality and legal reality: the act of stabbing is a physical event; once recontextualised (Fairclough 2003) through Sino-Vietnamese legal terminology, it becomes a legally defined offence.

This internal register-switching has structural parallels with code-switching in bilingual legal systems (Cao 2007) but is distinctive in that both 'codes' are varieties of a single language rather than two different languages. It constitutes a language-specific strategy for managing the simultaneous communicative requirements of narrative accessibility and normative precision.

5.3 Formulaic Language in Vietnamese Court Documents

Building on Nguyễn Thị Lệ's (2011) observation that repetitive phrases in court documents are a source of stylistic criticism, the present study reanalyses these patterns from a descriptive perspective: the recurring multi-word units are not stylistic deficiencies but genre-constitutive formulaic language (Tiersma 1999; Goźdź-Roszkowski 2011) performing specific legal functions. Three formula classes are identified:

(a) Statutory citation formulae — performing the empowerment function (Bhatia 1993): 'Căn cứ vào Điều... Bộ luật...' (Pursuant to Article... of the Code...); 'Áp dụng khoản..., điểm... Bộ luật/Luật...' (Applying clause..., point... of the Code/Law...); 'Chiếu theo các quy định nêu trên' (In accordance with the provisions cited above). Repetition is structurally obligatory because each legal basis must be cited in full for the ruling to have legal validity.

(4) Căn cứ vào Điều 123, khoản 1, điểm a Bộ luật hình sự năm 2015; Điều 355 Bộ luật tố tụng hình sự năm 2015; Tuyên phạt bị cáo Trần Văn B mức án tù chung thân. [Pursuant to Article 123, clause 1, point a of the Penal Code 2015; Article 355 of the Code of Criminal Procedure 2015; the defendant Trần Văn B is sentenced to life imprisonment.] (Appellate criminal verdict, High People's Court, Hanoi, 2023)

(b) Structural segmentation formulae — creating the recognisable genre architecture: 'Xét thấy...' (Having considered...); 'Hội đồng xét xử nhận định rằng...' (The panel finds that...); 'Về phần dân sự...' (On the civil aspect...); 'Xét yêu cầu của nguyên đơn...' (Considering the claimant's claim...).

(c) Ruling formulae — performative language (Austin 1962): 'Tuyên phạt...' (Sentences...); 'Buộc bị đơn phải...' (Orders the defendant to...); 'Chấp nhận toàn bộ/một phần yêu cầu...' (Upholds in full/in part the claim...); 'Bác kháng cáo...' (Dismisses the appeal...). This is the most legally significant class: the sentence itself constitutes the legal act.

(5) TUYÊN XỬ: Tuyên bố bị cáo Lê Thị C phạm tội 'Lừa đảo chiếm đoạt tài sản'. Áp dụng điểm a khoản 4 Điều 174 BLHS, xử phạt bị cáo 15 (mười lăm) năm tù. [RULES: Declares the defendant Lê Thị C guilty of 'Fraud and appropriation of property'. Applying point a, clause 4, Article 174 of the Penal Code, sentences the defendant to 15 (fifteen) years of imprisonment.] (Criminal verdict, Da Nang People's Court, 2024)

(6) Chấp nhận một phần yêu cầu của nguyên đơn. Buộc bị đơn Công ty TNHH X phải bồi thường số tiền 450,000,000 đồng (bốn trăm năm mươi triệu đồng). [Upholds in part the claimant's claim. Orders the defendant X LLC to pay compensation in the amount of VND 450,000,000 (four hundred and fifty million dong).] (Civil judgment, Ho Chi Minh City People's Court, 2023)

The dual-notation convention for monetary amounts — numeral plus spelled-out form in parentheses, as in example (6) — constitutes intentional information redundancy (Tiersma 1999), a deliberate strategy to eliminate the possibility of misreading. This convention is absent from other functional styles of Vietnamese and represents a domain-specific drafting norm.

6. Genre Structure: The Move Schema of Vietnamese Court Documents

6.1 Move Structure of First-Instance Criminal Verdicts

Applying the Swales (1990) / Bhatia (1993) genre analysis framework — which has not previously been applied to Vietnamese court documents — the study identified eight obligatory moves constituting the invariant structure of first-instance criminal verdicts in Vietnam:

Table 2. Genre Structure of the Vietnamese First-Instance Criminal Verdict

Move	Heading in Document	Communicative Function	Status
Move 1	State heading, motto, case identification	Establishes institutional authority and identifies the case	Obligatory
Move 2	Composition of the panel	Validates the legal composition of the bench	Obligatory
Move 3	Case facts / defendant background	Narrative of the alleged offence and personal history	Obligatory
Move 4	At the hearing — testimony, pleadings	Records and authenticates procedural acts	Obligatory
Move 5	Panel's reasoning / 'Having Considered'	Legal reasoning and evidence evaluation	Obligatory
Move 6	Applicable legal basis	Statutory citations; grounds for the ruling	Obligatory
Move 7	RULING — Sentencing / Judgment	Performative speech act creating legal reality	Obligatory
Move 8	Appeal guidance, enforcement	Post-trial procedural guidance; safeguards appeal rights	Obligatory
Move 9*	Minority opinion of dissenting judge	Reserves minority view; contributes to legal development	Optional

 

The eight obligatory moves follow a logically and legally constrained sequence that cannot be reordered. Each move presupposes the preceding one: Move 5 (legal reasoning) can only evaluate evidence that has been introduced in Move 4; Move 7 (ruling) can only be issued after Move 6 has cited the applicable legal basis. Violation of this sequence is not a stylistic matter but a procedural one: it can result in a judgment being quashed on grounds of procedural irregularity. The fixed-order obligatory schema is therefore simultaneously a linguistic feature and a legally enforceable structural requirement — a property that distinguishes legal genre from most other text types (Bhatia 1993).

6.2 Genre Variations Across the Four Document Sub-types

The eight-move schema constitutes the shared genre skeleton, but each sub-type shows principled modifications reflecting the distinctive procedural logic of the proceedings:

Civil judgments add Move 3b ('Claimant's demand') and Move 3c ('Respondent's plea or counterclaim') — reflecting the adversarial equality of civil procedure, in which both parties have equal standing to assert claims. The language in these two moves is predominantly indirect reported speech (Halliday 1985), positioning the court as a neutral mediator rather than an investigating authority.

Administrative rulings expand Move 5 with a sub-move 5a ('Assessment of the legality of the challenged administrative act') absent from the other two verdict types. The language here is oversight language: the court evaluates the legality of a state decision rather than adjudicating between private parties, which requires a specific discursive positioning of the court vis-à-vis the executive branch.

Cassation decisions (GĐT/HĐTP) have the most complex structure, adding moves for 'Evaluation of the challenged judgment' and 'Identification of legal errors in the lower court's reasoning'. The language must perform two simultaneous functions: ruling on the specific case and establishing interpretive guidance for the entire court system — the legislative function of judicial reasoning unique to case-law documents (Tiersma 1999).

Table 3. Comparative Genre Structure of the Four Court Document Types

Distinctive Move	Criminal	Civil	Administrative	Cassation/JC
Jurisdictional authentication	✓	✓	✓	✓
Narrative of facts	✓	✓	✓	✓
Claimant's demand / respondent's plea	—	✓ (obligatory)	✓	—
Legal reasoning and evidence evaluation	✓	✓	✓ + oversight	✓✓ (extended)
Evaluation of appealed judgment	—	—	—	✓ (cassation only)
Performative ruling	✓	✓	✓	✓
Case-law guidance language	—	—	—	✓ (JC only)

 

7. Pragmatic Features: Findings

7.1 Performative Language

Court documents are the paradigmatic instantiation of Austin's (1962) performative utterances in Vietnamese. The sentence 'Tuyên phạt bị cáo X 10 năm tù' ('Sentences defendant X to 10 years of imprisonment') does not describe an event: it creates one. From the moment the presiding judge pronounces the ruling, the defendant X acquires a new legal status and incurs new legal obligations. Language constitutes legal reality directly.

In Vietnamese court documents, performativity is signalled by three co-occurring formal markers: (a) a bare-infinitive legal verb without an expressed subject ('Tuyên phạt...'; 'Buộc...'; 'Chấp nhận...') — the absent subject is the bench, whose authority is indexically presupposed; (b) capitalisation or emboldening of the ruling section ('TUYÊN XỬ:', 'QUYẾT ĐỊNH:'); (c) typographical isolation of the ruling behind a colon after the formula introducing it. Compared with the indictment studied by Nguyễn Thị M. Trang (2024), performatives in court judgments are both stronger (they constitute final, enforceable decisions) and structurally more constrained (they are confined to Move 7).

This analysis of Vietnamese performativity extends findings from English and French legal linguistics (Kurzon 1986; Foley 1997) to a Sino-Vietnamese-based legal register, confirming that the performative mechanism is universal across legal systems while its surface realisations are language-specific.

7.2 Subject Anonymisation: A Power Strategy

The most pervasive pragmatic strategy in Vietnamese court documents is subject anonymisation (van Dijk 1997; Fairclough 1989): the concealment of individual human agency behind institutional, procedural, and evidential formulations. This strategy realises what Fairclough (1989) terms the naturalisation of ideology — making politically charged decisions appear as the natural, objective outcome of impersonal legal processes. Three sub-strategies are identified:

Institutional substitution: 'The judges decide...' → 'The bench [Hội đồng xét xử] decides...' The individual decision-makers are replaced by the collective institutional body, distributing and thereby diluting individual accountability.

Evidential substitution: 'We find that...' → 'Based on the documents, evidence in the case file and examined at the hearing, it is found that...' Human evaluative judgment is attributed to the evidentiary record, constructing the appearance of an objective, document-driven process.

Agent erasure: 'The court sentences the defendant to 10 years' → 'The defendant is sentenced to 10 years' (no subject). The human agent of punishment is deleted, and the sentence appears as the inevitable legal consequence of established facts.

(7) Hội đồng xét xử nhận định: Căn cứ vào các tài liệu, chứng cứ có trong hồ sơ vụ án và được thẩm tra tại phiên tòa, lời khai của các đương sự và kết quả tranh luận tại phiên tòa, Hội đồng xét xử có đủ cơ sở để nhận định... [The bench finds: Based on the documents and evidence in the case file and examined at the hearing, the parties' testimony and the results of the courtroom debates, the bench has sufficient grounds to find...] (Appellate civil judgment, High People's Court, Hanoi, 2023)

The triple redundancy of the evidence citation in example (7) — case file documents, evidence examined, testimony, court debates — serves to maximise the evidential basis attributed to the finding and thus to reinforce the perception of objectivity. This strategy functions to legitimate the exercise of institutional power (van Dijk 1997) and is structurally reproduced across the entire corpus.

7.3 Epistemic Modality Gradience: From Narrative to Adjudication

Vietnamese court documents display a systematic and functionally motivated gradience of epistemic modality (Halliday 1985) across the structural moves of the document:

In the testimony-narrative section (Move 4), modality is minimal and distanced: 'bị cáo khai rằng...' (the defendant testified that...), 'theo lời khai của...' (according to the testimony of...). The court positions itself as a recorder rather than an evaluator.

In the reasoning section (Move 5), hedged epistemic markers appear: 'xét thấy' (having considered), 'có đủ cơ sở để xác định' (there are sufficient grounds to establish), 'đủ căn cứ kết luận' (there are sufficient grounds to conclude). The court begins to assume an evaluative stance.

In the ruling section (Move 7), all hedging disappears. Declarative performative verbs operate without modal qualification. The court now speaks in the voice of the law itself.

This three-stage progression marks the moment at which the court 'takes ownership' of the evidence and transforms it into legally binding truth — what Fairclough (2003) terms recontextualisation: the transformation of contextually situated assertions into institutionally authorised facts. The progressive removal of hedging tracks the progressive assumption of legal authority and constitutes a discourse-level realisation of the performative mechanism described in Section 7.1.

8. Legal Euphemism in Vietnamese Court Documents

8.1 Conceptualisation

Legal language is conventionally characterised by precision and directness. The presence of a systematic euphemism system in Vietnamese court documents is therefore analytically significant: rather than representing imprecision, it constitutes a deliberate, principled linguistic strategy serving specific legal functions. The corpus yields four functional groups of legal euphemism, each serving a distinct foundational legal principle.

8.2 Group 1: Euphemism Humanising Punishment

This group employs more positive formulations to express the harsh realities of criminal sentencing, in service of the 'principle of socialist humanism' (nguyên tắc nhân đạo xã hội chủ nghĩa) in criminal justice:

Table 4. Euphemisms Humanising Punishment in Criminal Verdicts

Direct expression	Euphemism in court documents	Pragmatic function
No imprisonment	cho hưởng án treo (suspended sentence; 'granted suspension')	Foregrounds the State's clemency and humanitarian principle
Imprisonment	áp dụng hình phạt tù có thời hạn ('applying a fixed-term custodial penalty')	Technicisation; softens the punitive character in the text
Death penalty	hình phạt tử hình / mức án cao nhất ('capital punishment / the highest penalty')	Legal codification; avoids colloquial 'execution'
Pay money	thực hiện nghĩa vụ dân sự / hoàn trả số tiền ('fulfil the civil obligation / return the sum')	Juridical framing of a financial act
Humanitarian measure	biện pháp hình sự nhân đạo ('humanitarian criminal measure')	Double euphemism: simultaneously criminal and humanitarian

 

(8) Xét thấy bị cáo phạm tội ít nghiêm trọng, nhân thân tốt, có đủ điều kiện áp dụng biện pháp hình sự nhân đạo, Hội đồng xét xử quyết định cho bị cáo được hưởng án treo với thời gian thử thách là 02 (hai) năm. [Considering that the defendant committed a less serious offence and has a good personal record and meets the conditions for the application of a humanitarian criminal measure, the bench decides to grant the defendant a suspended sentence with a probationary period of 02 (two) years.] (Criminal verdict, District Court Y, 2022)

8.3 Group 2: Euphemism in Participant Classification — Avoiding Pre-judgment

Before passing a ruling, court documents must describe the parties without foreclosing the outcome. This generates a class of neutrality-preserving euphemisms:

'Người có quyền lợi và nghĩa vụ liên quan' ('persons with related interests and obligations') — a neutral umbrella term for parties who have a stake in the outcome but are not claimant or respondent, preserving the open-outcome framing required by adversarial procedure.

'Hành vi của bị cáo có dấu hiệu của tội phạm' ('the defendant's conduct exhibits the elements of a criminal offence') — used in the narrative section before the ruling — as against 'bị cáo đã phạm tội' ('the defendant committed the offence') used in the ruling itself. This distinction formally implements the presumption of innocence (Kurzon 2001): pre-ruling language uses lower epistemic modality than post-ruling language.

(9) Theo hồ sơ vụ án, hành vi của bị cáo có dấu hiệu của tội phạm quy định tại Điều 173 BLHS. Hội đồng xét xử sẽ xem xét, đánh giá toàn bộ chứng cứ để kết luận. [According to the case file, the defendant's conduct exhibits the elements of the offence prescribed in Article 173 of the Penal Code. The bench will examine and assess all the evidence in order to reach a conclusion.] (Criminal verdict, District Court X, 2021)

8.4 Group 3: Euphemism in Criticising Lower-Court Decisions

Cassation decisions face a distinctive pragmatic challenge: they must identify errors in lower-court reasoning while preserving the institutional authority of the judicial system as a whole. The result is a recognisable system of softened institutional criticism:

Table 5. Euphemisms in Cassation Decisions When Criticising Lower-Court Judgments

Communicative intent	Direct wording	Euphemistic formulation in cassation decisions
Lower court ruled incorrectly	Court X ruled wrongly	'The lower courts have not fully assessed the evidence…'
Judgment contains legal error	Wrong judgment	'The appellate judgment still contains shortcomings in the application of law…'
Reasoning lacks basis	Wrong reasoning	'The reasoning of the lower court lacks a solid legal basis when…'
Key facts overlooked	Court overlooked facts	'The court has not clarified the materially relevant circumstances…'
Quash for serious error	Quash wrong judgment	'There is no legal basis for maintaining the judgment…'

 

(10) Hội đồng Thẩm phán nhận thấy: Tòa án hai cấp chưa làm rõ nguồn gốc pháp lý của thửa đất tranh chấp, chưa đánh giá đầy đủ chứng cứ do các bên cung cấp. Bản án phúc thẩm không có cơ sở pháp lý vững chắc khi nhận định rằng quyền sử dụng đất thuộc về bị đơn. [The Judicial Council finds: The courts at both levels have not clarified the legal origin of the disputed land parcel, and have not fully evaluated the evidence provided by the parties. The appellate judgment lacks a solid legal basis in finding that the land use right belongs to the respondent.] (Cassation Decision No. .../2023/DS-GĐT, Judicial Council, Supreme People's Court)

8.5 Group 4: Euphemism in Offence Classification — Legal Cautiousness

Some offences have boundaries that are contested or unclear under substantive law, requiring the court to hedge its classificatory findings:

(11) Hành vi của bị cáo có đủ các yếu tố cấu thành tội phạm quy định tại khoản 2 Điều 134 BLHS. [The defendant's conduct meets all the constitutive elements of the offence prescribed in clause 2, Article 134 of the Penal Code.] (Criminal verdict — 'meets all the constitutive elements' rather than 'committed the offence')

(12) Xét tính chất, mức độ nguy hiểm cho xã hội của hành vi vi phạm, Hội đồng xét xử xác định bị cáo phạm tội theo khoản 1 chứ không phải khoản 2 như cáo trạng đề nghị. [Considering the nature and degree of social dangerousness of the conduct, the bench finds the defendant guilty under clause 1, not clause 2 as proposed by the indictment.] (Criminal verdict, Da Nang People's Court, 2024 — recharacterisation to a less serious provision)

The four euphemism groups together constitute a principled system: each serves a foundational legal principle (humanism, presumption of innocence, institutional legitimacy, legal caution) rather than vagueness or imprecision. This finding contradicts the common perception that precision and euphemism are mutually exclusive in legal drafting.

9. Discussion: Positioning Vietnamese Legal Language

9.1 Comparison with French and Anglo-American Legal Systems

Table 6. Comparative Features of Legal Language: Vietnam, France, USA/UK

Feature	Vietnam (socialist civil law)	France (civil law)	USA/UK (common law)
Classical terminology density	Very high (Sino-Vietnamese)	Moderate (Latin, Old French)	High (Latin, Norman French, archaic English)
Legal reasoning in judgments	Increasingly elaborate (since 2016)	Brief — primarily declaratory	Extensive — precedent analysis
Genre structure	8 obligatory moves, fixed sequence	5–6 moves, concise	6–10 moves, extended analysis
Role of case law	Emerging (án lệ system since 2016)	Limited (non-binding)	Central (stare decisis)
Legal euphemism	Systematic — 4 functional groups	Concise; relatively little euphemism	Extensive hedging and euphemism
Distinctive feature	Internal Sino-Vietnamese/vernacular bilingualism; high formulaicity	Brief Code citations	Adversarial argumentation; lengthy analysis

 

The comparative analysis reveals that Vietnamese legal language occupies a genuinely distinctive position in the typology of legal languages. In terms of its legal system architecture, it follows the French-continental civil-law model. In terms of its terminology system, it is closer to Chinese than to any European legal language — a consequence of the deep historical penetration of Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary into all specialised registers of Vietnamese. In terms of its developmental trajectory, the 2016 án lệ reform is pushing the system towards more elaborate judicial reasoning, a trend that will structurally increase the complexity of Move 5 in future court documents and may over time alter the genre structure documented here.

The internal Sino-Vietnamese/vernacular register-switching identified in Section 5.2 has no close equivalent in any European legal language system. The nearest structural parallel is diglossia between H and L varieties in bilingual legal systems (Cao 2007), but the Vietnamese case is distinctive in that both varieties belong to the same language and that their functional differentiation (normative vs. narrative) is systematic and genre-constitutive rather than socially stratified.

9.2 Research Limitations and Implications

Several limitations qualify the findings. First, the corpus, while substantial at 510,000 tokens, is limited to publicly accessible documents and may not fully represent sealed or commercially sensitive proceedings. Second, the Move analysis was conducted manually without computational validation; future work should replicate the analysis using automated segmentation tools. Third, the study is synchronic (2020–2024) and cannot trace diachronic change, though the án lệ reforms provide a natural historical bracket for future longitudinal study.

The findings have implications for three applied domains. For legal education, the description of the genre structure, vocabulary layers, and pragmatic strategies provides a theoretically grounded framework for teaching legal drafting to law students — moving beyond memorisation of formulae to understanding their communicative functions. For public legal communication, the characterisation of internal register-switching as the boundary between narrative accessibility and normative precision identifies the specific locus of linguistic barriers for non-specialist readers and points to targeted simplification strategies. For legal translation, the genre schema and vocabulary analysis provide a principled descriptive basis for translating Vietnamese court documents into other languages — an area of practice that lacks systematic descriptive foundations in the existing literature.

10. Conclusions

Based on corpus analysis of 150 court documents from the period 2020–2024 (approximately 510,000 tokens), approached through the integrated frameworks of genre analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Speech Act Theory, this article establishes four principal conclusions:

First, with respect to vocabulary: Vietnamese legal language is characterised by a high density of Sino-Vietnamese terminology, a system of internal register-switching (Sino-Vietnamese/vernacular Vietnamese) that maps onto the normative/narrative functional boundary, an extensive repertoire of genre-constitutive formulaic language, and the convention of dual numeric–alphabetic notation as intentional redundancy. These features collectively distinguish Vietnamese court-document language from all other functional styles of Vietnamese.

Second, with respect to genre: Vietnamese court documents follow an eight-move obligatory schema with a fixed, legally constrained sequence. The four document sub-types share this skeleton but exhibit principled modifications reflecting the distinctive procedural logic of criminal, civil, administrative, and cassation proceedings. This is the first systematic genre description of Vietnamese court documents using the Swales–Bhatia framework.

Third, with respect to pragmatics: court documents are the paradigmatic domain of performative language in Vietnamese. Four pragmatic strategies — performativity, subject anonymisation, systematic epistemic modality gradience, and a four-group euphemism system — together constitute the distinctive 'legal voice' of Vietnamese court documents: a voice that constructs authority as objective, law-given, and impersonal.

Fourth, with respect to euphemism: contrary to the assumption that legal precision and euphemism are incompatible, Vietnamese court documents deploy a systematic euphemism system in which each of the four groups serves a foundational legal principle (socialist humanism, presumption of innocence, judicial system legitimacy, and legal caution). Euphemism in this context is a precision instrument rather than a departure from precision.

These findings have both theoretical significance — contributing to the comparative and typological description of legal languages — and practical applications in legal education, public legal communication, and legal translation. The documented shift towards more elaborate judicial reasoning following the 2016 án lệ reform provides a productive focus for longitudinal follow-up research.

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