The indigenous people of the Central Highlands of Vietnam speak various endangered languages in close proximity. These languages are isolated, lack institutional status, and are politically persecuted. A diaspora community (the Montagnards) has been growing in Greensboro, North Carolina since the mid 1980s, after their participation in the Vietnam War. This situation allows linguists to advance the lacking description and documentation work of these minority languages much more easily, but the diaspora community is unique and presents its own challenges.

Language attrition is occurring rapidly for this community. Through a survey administered in 2023, the primary causes are a lack of language resources, and the pervasive feeling that the languages lack the vocabulary to describe experiences in the US. To address the languages’ lack of representation in the community and in linguistics, we are working with the community to record stories in several of the six attested languages. The project will preserve the culture that Montagnards sense is dissipating while also addressing the community’s wishes for language preservation. In turn, the stories collected will be translated by a team of a linguist and native speaker, which will provide some of the first steps towards complete documentation and description of these languages.

In North Carolina, the languages are in close contact, even more so than in the Central Highlands. Montagnards of different language backgrounds come together through church services and community events, both of which seem to be contributing to the development of a lingua franca. Gathering stories from many different speakers will demonstrate multilingualism's and the lingua franca's effect on individual languages.

We hypothesize that in this relatively new diaspora setting, the identity of individual tribes is superseded by their unified identity as “Montagnard,” emphasizing the shared traits and experiences of these people as refugees speaking minority languages.