Abstract

This article examines how Vietnamese audiences interpret and reconstruct meaning from nonstandard lyrics, phonological deviations, and translingual mixing in contemporary vocal performance. While traditional approaches often treat such deviations as errors, this study reframes them as manifestations of post-standardized vocality, where expressive force arises from the voice, affective resonance, and performance context rather than lexical accuracy. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and listener interviews across northern, central, and southern Vietnam (2022–2024), the analysis documents phonological irregularities (e.g., chẩy vs. chảy) and emergent multilingual blending (e.g., Vietnamese–English and Vietnamese–Korean). Findings indicate that lyric intelligibility is sustained through a mechanism of cross-affective inference: audiences rely on timbre, embodied cues, and cultural familiarity to make sense of hybrid expressions. To theorize this process, the study introduces two concepts—post-standardized vocality and post-monolingual vocality—to explain how meaning is co-constructed beyond linguistic norms. These frameworks extend debates in lyric pragmatics, ethnomusicology, and postcolonial sound studies, highlighting the agency of listeners and proposing a comparative model for analyzing voice, affect, and intelligibility in global popular music.