Maliêng (Vietnamese: Mã Liềng), a Vietic language, has intriguing patterns of interaction between lexical tone, phonation types and vowel qualities. Alexis Michaud will present fresh fieldwork results obtained in 2024 by Albert Badosa Roldós (Ph. D. student at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle) with a vibrant team of young Vietnamese phoneticians/phonologists (Tạ Thành Tấn, Trần Quang Minh, and Nguyễn Thị Minh Châu). A leading thread in the presentation will be that a collaborative, multidisciplinary approach, encompassing immersion fieldwork and diachronic phonology alongside experimental phonetics and phonological modelling, is of the essence to steer clear of various pitfalls: from the acoustic analysis of audio data to the interpretation of the tonal system as a whole.