Happy Images in Vietnamese Perception Through Idioms of Happiness: A Cultural Approach

Idioms illustrate special linguistic units since they reflect human wisdom in the perception of the world (Giang, 2023b). They have intertwined and transformed into archives of a community's culture in the past. Idioms also play a significant role in the linguistic ontologization of emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger, etc. Semantically, idioms in Vietnamese are all perceptively associated with typical images (Hanh, 2008), and idioms of happiness have their own happy images. The paper aims to investigate the happy images Vietnamese people perceive through idioms of happiness from a cultural perspective. This is a descriptive study that presents the theoretical background of Vietnamese idioms in general and the findings and discussion of happy images behind the idioms of happiness in particular. To gather the data, a hand search of Giang’s (2018) collection of Vietnamese idioms was conducted to provide a corpus of 32 entries, from which three groups of happy images were identified. Results from this study show that happy images in Vietnamese perception through idioms of happiness derive from (i) animals, (ii) human body parts, and (iii) events and festivals.