Stratified Institutional Equilibrium in Sacred Naming: Khmer Temple Denomination Under Minority–Majority Governance in Southwestern Vietnam
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1610.16Keywords:
onomastics, language contact, cultural memory, linguistic landscape, Theravāda Buddhism, Khmer temples, VietnamAbstract
This study examines Khmer temple denomination in Southwestern Vietnam through a corpus of 446 officially recognized temples. It argues that institutional temple denomination in this minority–majority setting is best interpreted as a stratified institutional equilibrium rather than as a linear process of assimilation or isolated resistance. All temple names in the corpus conform to the bipartite generic–specific template characteristic of Theravāda naming systems, indicating macro-structural continuity across mainland Southeast Asia. At the same time, lexical-origin stratification, motivational bifocality, and institutional polyonymy reveal systematic multilingual layering. Khmer-dominant specific elements remain prevalent, accounting for 71.7% of the corpus, whereas Vietnamese-including forms are significantly associated with parallel denominations, OR = 1.74, 95% CI [1.16, 2.61], p = .007. Ecological–geographical and religious–symbolic motivations coexist, with modest but significant covariance across lexical strata. Taken together, the findings suggest that institutional temple denomination operates as a governance-structured semiotic system in which linguistic form, cultural memory, environmental anchoring, and ethnolinguistic negotiation cohere within a relatively stable institutional configuration. The study therefore offers a stratified governance framework as an alternative to linear assimilation models for analyzing sacred denomination in multilingual polities.
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