Levels of Popularity of Greeting Customs in Vietnamese Culture and the Reflection of Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions

Abstract—Greeting customs in Vietnamese culture embrace a lot of interesting cultural values to discover. Having good understanding of the customs in this developing country is of great help for different fields including cultural studies, business relations, tourisms and education. Those social etiquettes have greatly developed over the past decades and undoubtedly play important roles in the social life of the people living in the country. Although there have been a considerable number of work addressing this area, the majority of them are in the native language which is Vietnamese rather than English or other widely used languages. Besides, there has been little work discussing the most common greeting customs which are currently being used in the social life of Vietnamese people. That explains why greeting customs in this culture remain unfamiliar to outsiders and considerably limit the introduction of the national cultural values to the world. The current paper, therefore, aims to fill in the gap by analyzing levels of popularity of the most common greeting customs in Vietnamese culture and discussing how Hofstede’s five cultural dimensions are reflected. A meta-analysis method is implemented in the study to analyze fifteen samples of research including one master thesis, two textbooks, five reports and seven published journal articles. The result reveals levels of popularity of the six common ways of greeting in Vietnamese culture. It also proves the full reflection of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions in greeting customs of the investigated culture

Index Terms—Vietnamese greetings, greeting culture in Viet Nam, Viet Nam culture, Vietnamese customs.

Phan Ngoc Son and Le Tan Cuong are with the Dong Nai Technology University, Viet Nam (e-mail: tancuong008@gmail.com).

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Cite: Phan Ngoc Son and Le Tan Cuong, "Levels of Popularity of Greeting Customs in Vietnamese Culture and the Reflection of Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions," International Journal of Culture and History vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 218-225, 2016.