This study investigates the cultural logic underpinning interactions in Vietnamese language and culture, adopting the ethnopragmatic research paradigm originating within the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework. The study draws on a variety of data sources, including two sets of original survey data and Vietnamese folk sayings and proverbs. First, the study seeks to elaborate the semantic and pragmatic content of key words for Vietnamese cultural conceptualisation in the forms of semantic explications and cultural scripts, using metapragmatic survey data. In this exploration, two overarching cultural schemas, namely quan hệ (‘relationship’) and thứ bậc (‘hierarchy’), are identified and several intertwined social categories, normative values and communicative virtues, underpinning the cultural logic of interaction explained. The study then seeks to discover how this cultural logic illuminates Vietnamese ideas about the management of ‘disagreement’ in interaction, under various scenarios and with various interlocutor types (e.g., older vs. younger, family members vs. outsiders), using data from an original discourse production questionnaire. Vietnamese folk sayings and proverbs and high-level cultural values are utilised for triangulation purposes.