Lost Tongues of the Red River: Annamese Middle Chinese & the Origins of the Vietnamese Language 
by John Phan

Among the world’s languages, Vietnamese provides unique insight into the cosmopolitan dynamism of premodern Asia. Modern notions of language history are often constrained by nationalist narratives, focused on bolstering a particular nation’s social, cultural, or political identities. A closer look at the Vietnamese language reveals a rich record of interaction and transformation that does not fit easily within modern nation-state lines or boundaries.

By employing philological, textual, and comparative linguistic methodologies, John D. Phan uncovers the history of a Sinitic language rooted in the Red River Plain of northern Vietnam, which he calls “Annamese Middle Chinese.” The life and death of this language stimulated dramatic transformations in the speech of the region, ultimately giving rise to a new and alloyed language over the early centuries of the second millennium—Vietnamese.

Drawing connections among linguistic, demographic, intellectual, and cultural realities over time, Phan traces the story of the emergence of Vietnamese within the broader context of a cosmopolitan East and Southeast Asia. Lost Tongues of the Red River demonstrates how language forms a surprisingly intimate record of human interaction—one with unique potential to enrich and expand our understanding of the distant past.

About the Author

John D. Phan is an Assistant Professor of Vietnamese Humanities in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures at Columbia University. He is a language historian focused on the ways in which the history of spoken language, literary language, and writing systems can reveal social, cultural and political realities of the premodern and early modern worlds. His first book focuses on the history of Sino-Vietic linguistic contact. His second project focuses on the vernacularization of early modern Vietnamese society, as exemplified by a vigorous practice of translation from Literary Sinitic into vernacular Vietnamese over the 17th -18th centuries, amidst the sociopolitical
regionalization of that period.

Professor John D. Phan will be joined by speakers Mark Alves, Robert Hymes, David Lurie, and Gray Tuttle.

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