To Mix or Not to Mix? A Study of English-Vietnamese Code-Mixing in Vietnamese Weekly Magazines

Vietnam is becoming increasingly interconnected with modern Asia and the wider global community across professional, cultural, and social spheres. This study investigates how English terms are used in Vietnamese magazine articles, exploring how such usage aligns with broader sociolinguistic trends and is shaped by the sociocultural context of contemporary Vietnam under globalisation. Framed within sociolinguistics, this mixed-methods study examines systematic patterns of code-mixing in the media, drawing on a substantial and carefully curated corpus of over 500,000 words from magazine articles published in 2024 targeting the educated general public . Three key research questions guide the analysis: (1) Which English terms appear in Vietnamese magazines, and what are their frequencies and distributions? (2) What patterns and functions do these borrowings serve? (3) What are the morphological and phonological characteristics of both non-English and Vietnamese-adapted English terms? The findings revealed that English borrowings accounted for less than 1% of the total word count across all thematic subsets. Their presence varied significantly by topic, with technology- and science-related articles, as well as those on music, travel, and cuisine, showing higher concentrations of foreign terms. Adapted English terms exhibited notable phonological and morphological features, while a small number of borrowings from French, Korean, Indonesian, and Malay were also identified. These findings reflect Vietnam’s dynamic engagement with both Western and Asian cultural and geopolitical influences. The study contributes to our understanding of Vietnam’s evolving media landscape and offers meaningful insights to the Asian Englishes research agenda. Keywords: sociolinguistics; code-switching; code-mixing; English-Vietnamese code-mixing; Vietnamese weekly magazines