Linguistic features of Vietnamese legal language: a study of court documents (2020–2025)

 https://doi.org/10.14746/cl.2026.67.2

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 People's Court's Judicial Council - issued between 2020 and 2025 (533,912 word tokens). Unlike previous Vietnamese studies that focused on lexical errors in court verdicts (2011) or on legal terminology in normative legal texts, this study treats court documents as an independent genre and analyzes them along three dimensions: (1) vocabulary - Sino-Vietnamese terminology, internal register-switching, and formulaic language; (2) genre structure - an eight-move obligatory schema identified for the first time in Vietnamese court documents through Swales–Bhatia genre theory; and (3) pragmatics - performative speech acts, subject anonymization as a power strategy, gradience of epistemic modality, and a four-group system of legal euphemism serving distinct legal principles. These features together constitute a distinctive “legal tone” of Vietnamese court documents. The findings contribute to the theory of Vietnamese legal linguistics 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. Introduction

Legal language is the linguistic system used in legal texts, procedures, and institutions, including statutes, decrees, contracts, court judgments, and many other genres. It is a distinctive functional variety that shares general features of administrative-official language while also possessing characteristics found in no other style. Legal texts demand absolute precision, normative obligatoriness, and legal effect attached to every linguistic choice.

Within the system of legal texts, court documents - particularly judgments and decisions of the Supreme People's Court - occupy a position of special importance. They are not only the outcome of judicial proceedings but also a source of case law, directly affecting the rights and obligations of the parties concerned. For this reason, the language of court documents must simultaneously satisfy two conflicting requirements: it must be precise enough to carry legal validity, yet clear enough for ordinary citizens to understand the judgments that concern them.

This article systematically analyzes the language of Vietnamese court documents from 2020 to 2025 along three focal dimensions: (1) legal vocabulary - Sino-Vietnamese terminology and the phenomenon of internal register-switching; (2) genre - the structure of judgments; and (3) pragmatics - strategies of linguistic power and legal euphemism.

2. Literature Review

2.1. International research on legal language

Research on legal linguistics worldwide has a substantial theoretical and empirical tradition. Mellinkoff (1963) was the first to systematize the features of English legal language, identifying tendencies toward archaic vocabulary, foreign borrowings, long sentences, and deliberately vague expressions. Tiersma's (1999) Legal Language remains the most comprehensive treatment of Anglo-American legal language, analyzing the entire system of legal texts from vocabulary to pragmatics. Bhatia (1993) applied genre theory to the analysis of English legal texts, laying the groundwork for treating judgments as an independent genre. Gibbons (2003) studied forensic linguistics, including the analysis of courtroom discourse.

In Asia, studies of Chinese legal language (Liu 2003; Li 2016) share considerable common ground with the Vietnamese context, owing to a shared foundation in the socialist civil-law system and a high proportion of Sino-derived terminology. Notably, the most recent study by Do et al. (2025) on legal reasoning in Vietnamese judgments approaches the subject from the perspective of the sociology of law but does not analyze it linguistically.

2.2. Research on legal language in Vietnam

Vietnamese legal-linguistics research remains young and can be grouped into four strands. The first concerns general administrative-legal language: Đinh and Nguyễn (1993), Nguyễn V.K. (2014), Dương (2008) and Đỗ V.H. (2015) examine style and structure across statutes and decrees, without focusing on court documents specifically. The second concerns legal terminology: Lê (1999) and Nguyễn T.L.N. (2019) analyse Vietnamese legal terms mainly in statutory texts. The third concerns lexical errors in judgments: Nguyễn T.L. (2011) classifies three error types in judgments, a prescriptive approach that contrasts with the descriptive aim adopted here. The fourth concerns discourse and appraisal analysis: Nguyễn T.H. (2010) examines administrative texts, while Phan (2024) applies Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005) to indictments rather than judgments.

No prior study has (a) surveyed all four types of Vietnamese court document together, (b) analysed them from a genre and power-in-discourse perspective, or (c) used 2020–2025 data, the period in which the case-law system has operated long enough to shape judicial language. These gaps motivate the present contribution.

3. Theoretical Framework, Corpus, and Methodology

3.1. Theoretical approach

Three complementary frameworks are combined: (a) genre analysis (Swales, 1990; Bhatia, 1993, 2017), for the obligatory-move structure of the judgment; (b) critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1989; van Dijk, 1997; Wodak & Meyer, 2016), for power relations expressed through anonymization strategies; (c) speech act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969; Marmor, 2014), for the judgment as a sequence of performative utterances that create legal reality rather than merely describing it.

3.2. Corpus source and processing

The corpus was collected from the Supreme People's Court's system for publishing judgments and decisions (congbobanan.toaan.gov.vn), covering the period 2020–2025. Table 1 reports the composition of the four sub-corpora together with the density of Sino-Vietnamese legal terminology in each.

Document type	No. of docs	Issuing authority	Tokens	Types	Legal terms	Sino-Vietnamese terms	SV/legal terms (%)
Criminal judgments (first-instance, appellate, cassation)	50	District-level and provincial/city courts	120,419	2,357	565	425	75.22
Civil judgments (contract, land, marriage and family disputes)	50	District-level and provincial/city courts	247,000	2,179	566	432	76.33
Administrative judgments (complaints against administrative decisions/acts)	30	District-level and provincial/city courts	124,132	1,935	432	340	78.70
Cassation decisions, precedents	20	Supreme People's Court (Judicial Council)	42,361	1,382	309	251	81.23
Whole corpus	150	—	533,912	7,853	1,872	1,448	77.35

Table 1. Corpus of court documents surveyed (2020–2025) and density of Sino-Vietnamese legal terminology across document types.

Data were processed in four steps: (i) collection and cleaning – PDF files were converted to plain UTF-8 text, with document numbers, seals and watermarks removed; (ii) word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging, to identify the boundaries of bi- and poly-syllabic Sino-Vietnamese compounds not marked by white space; (iii) frequency extraction with the concordance tool AntConc (Anthony, 2022), generating word lists and n-grams for each sub-corpus and the whole corpus; (iv) term matching against a legal-terminology list to identify Sino-Vietnamese legal terms.

3.3 Analytic procedure

This study adopts a corpus-based mixed-methods design implemented in four sequential phases. First, purposive stratified sampling was applied to select 150 court documents, balanced across four genres, geographical locations, and adjudication levels (first-instance, appellate, and cassation) to mitigate sampling bias. Second, a close reading of the corpus was conducted by simultaneously synthesising genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, and speech act theory. Third, the resulting qualitative criteria were formalised into a structured coding scheme (comprising Sino-Vietnamese terminology, formulaic expressions, and euphemisms) to facilitate data classification. Finally, descriptive statistics and cross-tabulations were computed via AntConc to extract and compare the frequencies of these target linguistic features.

4. Lexical features

4.1. Sino-Vietnamese terminology as the foundational layer

Sino-Vietnamese terms account for 77.35% of legal terminology in court documents (Table 1). Court documents draw simultaneously on the terminology of substantive and procedural law, which raises the proportion further. Relative to the entire corpus, however, Sino-Vietnamese terms represent only 18.4% of all word types (1,448 of 7,853 – Table 1), because the “case facts” section, the bulk of any judgment, is expressed mainly in native Vietnamese; Sino-Vietnamese density is concentrated in the remaining sections. Example:

(1) “Defendant Nguyễn Văn A committed the offense of “Murder” under Article 123 of the 2015 Penal Code (as amended and supplemented in 2017).” (Criminal judgment, Hanoi People's Court, 2022)

 

Figure 1 illustrates Sino-Vietnamese term density in a criminal judgment (boxed in red).

 

Figure 1. Sino-Vietnamese term density in a civil judgment (illustrative excerpt).

Sino-Vietnamese legal terminology in court documents can be classified into five functional groups:

 

(a) Nouns denoting procedural participants: bị cáo (defendant), bị đơn (defendant in a civil case), nguyên đơn (plaintiff), bị hại (victim), Hội đồng xét xử (Trial Panel), Kiểm sát viên (Procurator), Hội thẩm nhân dân (People's Assessor), etc. A key feature is that each term denotes a single, specific legal status tied to a particular procedural stage - for example, bị can (“the accused,” during investigation) differs from bị cáo (“the defendant,” during trial). As Nguyễn T.L. (2011) has shown, this distinction is often conflated in practice, giving rise to serious errors of reference.

(b) Nouns denoting core legal concepts: pháp nhân (legal entity), quyền (right), quyền lợi (interest), nghĩa vụ (obligation), nhân thân (personal status), thân nhân (next of kin), nghĩa vụ dân sự (civil obligation), bồi thường thiệt hại (damages), tình tiết (circumstance), kháng cáo (appeal), kháng nghị (protest), phúc thẩm (appellate review), giám đốc thẩm (cassation review), tái thẩm (reopening/retrial), thời hiệu (statute of limitations), thẩm quyền (jurisdiction), án phí (court fees), hình sự (criminal), dân sự (civil), vụ án (case), bản án (judgment), cáo trạng (indictment), etc.

(c) Performative legal verbs: tuyên phạt (to sentence), truy tố (to prosecute), xét xử (to try), bác bỏ (to reject), chấp nhận (to accept/uphold), hủy bỏ (to annul), đình chỉ (to suspend/discontinue), áp dụng (to apply), viện dẫn (to invoke), luận tội (to indict/argue guilt), căn cứ (to base [a decision] on), etc. This group is especially important, as these verbs create legal reality the moment they are uttered in a courtroom context.

(d) Constative legal verbs describing conduct: phạm tội (to commit an offense), chủ mưu (to instigate), tòng phạm (to be an accomplice), hành hung (to assault), tiêu hủy [chứng cứ] (to destroy [evidence]), cố ý (intentionally), vô ý (unintentionally), khai nhận (to confess/testify), thừa nhận (to admit), biện minh (to justify), tố giác (to denounce), tố cáo (to accuse/report), xác nhận (to confirm), etc.

(e) Legal adjectives forming binary oppositions: hợp pháp/bất hợp pháp (lawful/unlawful), hiệu lực/vô hiệu lực (valid/invalid), cố ý/vô ý (intentional/unintentional), có căn cứ/vô căn cứ (well-founded/unfounded), etc. This is a salient grammatical feature that supports the binary classification underlying the “guilty/not guilty,” “right/wrong” logic of legal reasoning. It parallels the system of legal adjectives found in French and German legal language (Mattila, 2013), although the specific Sino-Vietnamese lexical forms are language-specific.

4.2. Internal register-switching

A syntactic-lexical feature specific to Vietnamese court documents that, to the best of our knowledge, has not previously been systematically documented is internal register-switching: within the same sentence or paragraph, the text alternates between Sino-Vietnamese terminology (in the legal-technical portions) and native Vietnamese vocabulary (in the portions describing factual events). This boundary marks two different functions within the same text. Below we analyze several examples:

(2) Narrative portion: “The defendant confessed that at around 9 p.m. on 15 March 2022, he stabbed the victim Nguyễn Thị D multiple times with a sharp knife.” Reasoning portion: “The defendant's conduct constitutes the offense provided in clause 2, Article 134 of the PENAL CODE on “Intentional infliction of injury.”” (Criminal judgment, Hai Phong City Court, 2023)

4.3. Formulaic language

Building on Nguyen Thi Le's (2011) observation of recurrent phrases in judgments, we reinterpret this phenomenon from a positive standpoint: recurrent phrases are not stylistic errors but “formulaic language,” a genre-defining feature (Tiersma, 1999; Goźdź-Roszkowski, 2011) through which formulaic expressions perform determinate legal functions. Three groups of formulaic expressions were identified:

(a) Legal-reference formulae perform an empowerment function: “Pursuant to Article… of the Code…”, “Applying clause…, point… of the Code/Law…”, “In accordance with the foregoing provisions,” etc. Repetition here is obligatory, since every legal basis must be fully cited for the judgment to be valid.

(b) Section-marking formulae create a recognizable generic structure: “Considering that…”, “The Trial Panel finds that…”, “Regarding the civil aspect…”, “Regarding the plaintiff's claim…”, etc.

(c) Adjudicative formulae: these enable language to perform acts such as “Sentences…”, “Orders the defendant to…”, “Accepts all/part of the claim…”, “Rejects the appeal…”, etc. This is the most legally significant group, since the sentence itself creates legal reality.

A related convention – writing sums both in figures and in words (“VND 450,000,000 (four hundred fifty million đồng)”) – functions as intentional redundancy against alteration or error, a feature not found in other Vietnamese functional styles.

5. Genre Features

5.1. Genre-structure analysis of first-instance criminal judgments

In this section we apply the genre theory of Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993). To the best of our knowledge, this approach has not previously been applied to Vietnamese court documents. We identify a sequence of eight obligatory moves that constitute the invariant structure of first-instance criminal judgments in Vietnam, together with one optional move, as set out in Table 2 below, which also compares how each move is realized across the four document types.

Move	Linguistic function	Status / occurrence	Criminal	Civil	Administrative	Cassation
1. National title, motto, case identification	Establishing jurisdiction and identification	Obligatory, 100%	✓	✓	✓	✓
2. Composition of the Trial Panel	Establishing the lawful composition of the Trial Panel	Obligatory, 100%	✓	✓	✓	✓
3. Case narrative / defendant's background (+3b claim, 3c response in civil)	Narrating the facts and circumstances of the case	Obligatory, 100%	✓	✓ (+3b, 3c)	✓	✓
4. Courtroom proceedings / testimony and argument	Recording and confirming the proceedings	Obligatory, 100%	✓	✓	✓	✓
5. Trial Panel's findings / “Considering that…” (+5a oversight in administrative)	Legal reasoning, evaluation of evidence	Obligatory, 100%	✓	✓	✓ (+5a)	✓✓ (deeper; + assessment of judgment under protest)
6. Applicable legal grounds	Citing the law, establishing legality of the decision	Obligatory, 100%	✓	✓	✓	✓
7. DECISION – Judgment	Adjudication (performative speech act)	Obligatory, 100%	✓	✓	✓	✓
8. Instructions on appeal and enforcement	Post-trial guidance, safeguarding procedural rights	Obligatory, 100%	✓	✓	✓	✓
9*. Dissenting opinion of a minority judge	Reserving an opinion, developing legal reasoning	Optional, 2%	–	–	–	✓ (Judicial Council)

Table 2. Generic structure of Vietnamese court judgments (eight obligatory moves, one optional move) and its variation across the four document types.

This fixed sequence of eight obligatory moves constitutes the distinctive generic feature of court documents. The order cannot be reversed, since each move stands in a logical and legal relationship to the next. A violation of this sequence is not merely a stylistic error but may result in the judgment being annulled for procedural violation.

Following Bhatia's (2017) more recent interdiscursive extension of genre analysis, we treat this move structure not as a static template but as a site where legal, procedural and institutional discourses interact within a single professional genre.

5.2. Comparative features across the four types of court documents

Surveying all four sub-corpora (criminal, civil, and administrative judgments, and cassation decisions), we find that the eight-move structure serves as a common framework (Table 2), but each document type introduces significant adjustments reflecting its specific procedural nature:

Civil judgments add Move 3b, “the plaintiff's claim,” and Move 3c, “the defendant's response/counterclaim.” This reflects the adversarial equality structure of civil proceedings. The language of these two moves is more heavily marked by reported speech, positioning the court as an intermediary.

Administrative judgments expand Move 5 into Move 5a, “reviewing the legality of the contested administrative decision.” This move is absent from the other two judgment types. The language here is oversight language: the court assesses the legality of a state decision rather than passing judgment on an individual.

Cassation decisions have the most complex structure, adding the moves “assessment of the judgment under protest” and “determination of legal violations in the trial.” The language must simultaneously perform two functions: adjudicating the specific case and providing nationwide guidance for the uniform application of law.

6. Pragmatic Features

6.1. Performative language

According to the speech act theory of Austin (1962) and Searle (1969) and, more recently, Marmor's (2014) philosophy-of-language account of legal speech, court documents are the clearest illustration of performative speech acts. The sentence “Sentences defendant X to 10 years' imprisonment” does not describe an event already occurring; rather, it brings that event into being. From the moment the Trial Panel pronounces it, defendant X acquires a new legal status and is bound by new legal obligations. Language directly creates legal reality.

In Vietnamese legal texts, performative language is marked by three signals: (a) legal verbs in the bare infinitive with no overt subject (“Sentences…”, “Orders…”, “Accepts…”); (b) the adjudicative portion set in capitals or bold; and (c) the placement of the ruling in a syntactically detached position following a colon. Compared with the language of indictments (Phan, 2024), the performative language of judgments is stronger and carries greater legal obligatoriness, because an indictment is proposal-like in nature whereas a judgment is decisional.

6.2. Anonymization and objectification

The most distinctive pragmatic strategy of court documents is the anonymization of the subject, concealing the human agent behind legal procedures and institutions. Fairclough (1989) terms this the “naturalization of ideology” - making decisions that are inherently political appear to be a natural, objective outcome. Specifically:

Institutionalizing the subject: “The judges decide…” → “The Trial Panel decides…”

Evidentializing the grounds: “We find that…” → “Based on the documents and evidence in the case file, it is found that…” (a subjectless clause)

Erasing the sentencing subject: “The court sentences the defendant to 10 years' imprisonment” → “Sentences the defendant to 10 years' imprisonment” (a subjectless clause). Example:

(3) “The Trial Panel finds: based on the documents and evidence in the case file and examined at trial, together with the parties' testimony and the results of the courtroom debate, the Trial Panel has sufficient grounds to find that…” (Appellate civil judgment, Hanoi High Court, 2023)

This strategy creates the impression that a verdict is the objective outcome of law rather than an individual judge's will, reinforcing the legitimacy of the decision.

6.3. Epistemic modality gradience

Court documents display a distinctive gradience of epistemic modality that changes systematically according to the function of each section:

In the testimony-narrating section: “the defendant testified that…”, “according to the testimony of…” - a low degree of certainty, with the court positioning itself as a mere recorder.

In the reasoning section: “considering that”, “there are sufficient grounds to determine”, “sufficient grounds to conclude” - a moderate degree of certainty, as the court begins to evaluate.

In the adjudicative section: no hedges are used; direct action verbs express absolute certainty - the final decision.

This shift marks the moment at which the court “receives” evidence and converts it into legal fact. It is a pragmatic turning point that functional linguistics terms “recontextualization” (Fairclough, 2003).

7. Legal euphemism

7.1. The concept

In traditional linguistic scholarship, euphemism is generally viewed as a rhetorical strategy for softening vulgarity, avoiding sensitive topics, or attenuating the severity of a message in everyday communication (Allan & Burridge, 2006). Within legal discourse, however - a space in which precision, directness, and transparency are always regarded as paramount principles - the presence of euphemism does not merely serve the purpose of ordinary politeness-based mitigation. Instead, euphemisms constitute a distinct functional system that reflects the dual nature of court documents: they are at once technical documents demanding a high degree of precision and power documents that execute the will of the state.

Drawing on Austin's (1962) framework of performativity, this study takes an initial step toward approaching euphemism in court documents not as a device for concealing or obscuring reality, but as a mechanism of recontextualization - we tentatively propose this as a theoretical hypothesis rather than an empirically verified claim. Through this mechanism, real-life events of a violent, raw, or socially sensitive nature are translated into a legal terminological system that is emotionally neutral, thereby establishing a new, controlled “legal reality.” In other words, legal euphemism does not merely describe conduct but also serves to normalize that conduct in legal terms, transforming everyday discourse into coercive, authoritative discourse.

From a linguistic-typological perspective, the euphemism system in the surveyed corpus tends to be realized predominantly through disyllabic Sino-Vietnamese compounds. This lends court documents a formal, objective tone while creating the psychological distance necessary between the adjudicating subject (the Trial Panel) and the adjudicated party (the defendant). We confine this interpretive claim to what the linguistic evidence supports and do not extend it into unverified socio-legal or economic explanations. Based on a binary classification of functional markers across the 150 documents in the corpus, we find that these euphemisms typically operate flexibly along two axes: on one hand maintaining the rigor of the law (technical), and on the other expressing humaneness or the institution's absolute authority. We identify four functional groups of euphemism, summarized with their illustrative expressions and frequency distribution in Table 3.

7.2. Group 1: Euphemisms humanizing punishment

This group uses more positive language to express the harsh realities of punishment, in keeping with the “principle of socialist humanity” in criminal justice. Table 3 (Group 1 row) lists the core direct-expression/euphemism pairs identified in the corpus. Example:

(4) “Considering that the defendant committed a less serious offense and has a good personal record, and that the conditions for applying a humane criminal measure are satisfied, the Trial Panel decides to grant the defendant a suspended sentence with a probationary period of 02 (two) years.” (Criminal judgment, Y District Court, 2022)

7.3. Group 2: Euphemisms in the classification of subjects

Before pronouncing judgment, a court document must describe the parties in a manner that avoids prejudging the outcome or premature labeling. This gives rise to certain euphemisms specific to the classification of subjects. For example:

“Persons with related rights and obligations” is a neutral euphemism used to avoid classifying parties as winning or losing before the outcome is decided. It is an umbrella term covering all parties other than the plaintiff/defendant who nonetheless have an interest in the case.

“The defendant's conduct shows indicia of an offense” (used in the case-summary section, prior to the reasoning section) is a euphemistic way of softening the court's assessment compared with “the defendant has committed an offense” (used in the adjudicative section). This distinction adheres to the presumption of innocence: before judgment is pronounced, language of lower certainty is used. Example:

(5) “According to the case file, the defendant's conduct shows indicia of the offense provided in Article 173 of the Penal Code. The Trial Panel will review and assess all evidence before reaching a conclusion.” (Criminal judgment, Phu Nhuan District Court, 2021)

7.4. Group 3: Euphemisms in criticizing lower-court judgments

A cassation decision of the Judicial Council poses a special euphemistic demand: it must point out the errors of the lower court without discrediting the judicial system as a whole. The result is a distinctive system of “gentle criticism” euphemisms, listed in the Group 3 row of Table 3. Example:

(6) “The Judicial Council finds: the courts at both levels have not clarified the legal origin of the disputed land parcel and have not fully assessed the evidence submitted by the parties. The appellate judgment lacks solid legal grounds in finding that the land-use right belongs to the defendant.” (Cassation Decision 2023/DS-GĐT of the Judicial Council of the Supreme People's Court)

7.5. Group 4: Euphemisms in determining charges -balancing precision and caution

Certain offenses have unclear boundaries in positive law, compelling court documents to use euphemism to avoid premature conclusions. This gives rise to a layer of “legalized doubt” euphemisms. Examples:

(7) “The defendant's conduct fully satisfies the elements of the offense provided in clause 2, Article 134 of the Penal Code.” (Criminal judgment)

Taken together, these four groups of euphemism show that euphemism in court documents is not a matter of imprecision or vagueness but a deliberate linguistic strategy serving specific legal principles: humaneness (Group 1), the presumption of innocence (Group 2), protection of the judiciary's credibility (Group 3), and legal caution (Group 4). Table 3 summarizes the illustrative expressions of all four groups together with their frequency distribution across the corpus.

Group / legal principle	Direct expression	Euphemism used in the corpus	n	%
Group 1 -Humanizing punishment (socialist humanity)	not having to go to prison; imprisonment; dying in prison (execution); paying money; a humane measure	“granted a suspended sentence”; “sentenced to imprisonment / a fixed-term prison sentence”; “the highest penalty / the death penalty”; “performing a civil obligation / returning the sum”; “a humane criminal measure”	187	38.5
Group 2 - Classifying subjects (presumption of innocence)	the winning/losing party; the defendant has committed an offense	“person with related rights and obligations”; “the defendant's conduct shows indicia of an offense”	166	34.2
Group 3 - Criticizing lower courts (protecting judicial credibility)	Court X ruled wrongly; the judgment is wrong; the reasoning is wrong; the court overlooked it; the judgment is wrongly decided	“the adjudicating levels did not fully assess the evidence”; “still contains errors in the application of law”; “lack solid legal grounds”; “has not clarified circumstances of significant import”; “no legal basis to uphold the judgment”	35	7.2
Group 4 - Determining charges (legal caution)	has committed the offense	“fully satisfies the elements of the offense”; “committed the offense under clause 1 rather than clause 2”	98	20.2
Total			486	100

Table 3. Legal euphemism in Vietnamese court documents: functional groups, direct expressions, illustrative euphemisms, and frequency distribution (n = 486).

8. Discussion: situating Vietnamese legal language

8.1 Vietnam compared with France and the US/UK

To situate our findings within a broader theoretical context, we compare Vietnamese legal language with two systems that have exerted direct historical influence. Table 4 below is constructed by cross-referencing secondary literature on French and Anglo-American legal language (Mattila, 2013; Tiersma, 1999) rather than a parallel corpus of our own; the comparison should therefore be read as a set of hypotheses or tendencies rather than established facts, particularly regarding claims about the distinctiveness of Vietnamese legal language in relation to the European legal traditions.

Feature	Vietnam (socialist civil law)	France (civil law)	UK/US (common law)
Proportion of Sino-derived/Latin/archaic terms	Very high (Sino-Vietnamese)	Moderate (Latin, Old French)	High (Latin, Old English–Norman French)
Legal reasoning in judgments	Increasingly detailed (since 2016)	Brief, mainly stating the ruling	Very detailed, precedent-based analysis
Genre structure	8 obligatory moves, fixed order	5–6 moves, concise	6–10 moves, extended analysis
Role of precedent	Developing (case law since 2016)	Limited (not binding)	Foundational principle (stare decisis)
Legal euphemism	A systematic set of 4 groups	Concise, few euphemisms	Extensive euphemism and hedging
Distinctive feature	Internal Sino-Vietnamese/native code-switching; highly formulaic	Concise reference to the Civil Code	Long, detailed adversarial argumentation

Table 4. Comparison of legal-language features: Vietnam, France (civil law), and the UK/US (common law).

This comparative analysis suggests, as a tendency rather than an established fact, that Vietnamese legal language occupies a distinctive position within the typology of legal languages. In terms of legal-system structure, it follows the civil-law model of France and continental Europe. In terms of its terminological system, however, it is closer to Chinese than to any European legal language - a consequence of the historically deep penetration of Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary into every specialized register of Vietnamese. In terms of developmental trajectory, the 2016 case-law reform is pushing the system toward more detailed judicial reasoning, a trend that could structurally increase the complexity of Move 5 in future court documents and may, over time, alter the generic structure documented in this study.

The internal stylistic switching between Sino-Vietnamese terminology and native Vietnamese vocabulary has no close equivalent in any European legal-language system. The nearest structural parallel is the phenomenon of diglossia between high and low varieties in bilingual legal systems; the Vietnamese case differs, however, in that both varieties belong to the same language, and their functional differentiation (rule-governed normative language versus narrative description of the case) is systematic and genre-constitutive rather than socially stratified.

8.2. Applications

The findings have direct practical applications in three areas: (a) legal education - helping law students recognize and master legal language not only through studying substantive law but also through the linguistic analysis of court documents; (b) public legal communication - understanding linguistic barriers (particularly internal Sino-Vietnamese/Vietnamese code-switching and formulaic expressions) so as to simplify texts selectively, ensuring that citizens can access the judgments that concern them; and (c) legal translation - providing a descriptive framework of generic and lexical features to underpin the translation of Vietnamese judgments into foreign languages, a field still little studied in Vietnam.

9. Conclusion

Based on the analysis of 150 Vietnamese court documents (2020–2025), approached through genre theory, critical discourse analysis and speech act theory, four main conclusions emerge. First, at the lexical level, Vietnamese legal language is characterized by high Sino-Vietnamese term density, internal register-switching marking the narrative/normative boundary, a rich formulaic layer, and the double numeral convention as intentional redundancy. Second, at the genre level, the Vietnamese judgment follows an obligatory eight-move structure in fixed order; the four document types share this backbone with type-specific adaptations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic Swales/Bhatia-based description of Vietnamese court-document genre structure. As with the other qualitative findings reported here, it should be treated as a preliminary result pending further quantitative verification. Third, at the pragmatic level, the court judgment is the paradigm site of performative language in Vietnamese, alongside subject anonymization, systematic epistemic-modality gradience, and euphemism, jointly producing a distinctive judicial voice. Fourth, contrary to the assumption that legal language avoids euphemism, Vietnamese court documents deploy a systematic four-group euphemism system, each group serving a distinct legal principle – humanity, presumption of innocence, institutional credibility, and legal caution – rather than representing imprecision.

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