Harvard Asia Center Author Q+A: Lost Tongues of the Red River

Harvard Asia Center Author Q+A: Lost Tongues of the Red River

1. Introduction & Context

Q: Could you give us an overview of your book?
 Lost Tongues of the Red River examines how the Vietnamese language as we know it today, emerged through a history of intensive contact with various forms of the Chinese language. In particular, it demonstrates how a living Chinese language native to the 1st millennium Red River Plain (the area of modern-day northern Vietnam) was spoken alongside the genealogical ancestor of the Vietnamese language, and, through a process of language shift and obsolescence, contributed deeply to the structural formation of Modern Vietnamese.

This linguistic history reveals deep historical realities that are oftentimes obscured by modern nation-state boundaries, and our tendency (in both obvious and subtle ways) to project modern nationalist ideologies on to the distant past. It also explores the profound and complicated diversity of the early and medieval Sinitic empires, from the perspective of the Far South.

Q: What drew you to this area of research?
 I am fascinated by language as a lens through which to understand human society, culture, and history. I am especially interested in how the structure of language, and the study of its historical development, can shed light on the distant past, often in ways that betray long-held assumptions about culture or identity. This is especially true from the perspective of modern nationalist ideation, which tends to categorize the diversity of human culture into neatly defined brands of national identity. Though we may know this to be untenable, it remains a deeply ingrained proclivity, which continues to distort--not only our understanding of the distant past--but the very questions we pose about it.

Language is both a conscious and unconscious affair--it is governed by an internal systematicity while also being profoundly receptive to social, cultural, and political forces. It forms, therefore, an ideal record of human interaction and cultural practice over time--one that is retrievable, precisely because language is governed by internally consistent rules.

As for Vietnam--it is a culture, language, and region that sits at an historical crossroads, but which is often forced into this or that category, largely to serve contemporary political narratives. Indeed, modern tensions between China and Vietnam have long served to warp or even muffle investigation into what is a complicated, and richly shared history. Lost Tongues seeks to put that complexity under the microscope, by examining the intertwined histories of the Sinitic and Vietic languages of the Red River Plain.

2. Core Ideas

Q: What questions were driving the writing of this book?
 This book began with an observation about the Chinese or Sinitic elements within modern Vietnamese language. There is a preponderance of Sinitic vocabulary that survives in modern Vietnamese, ranging from highly specific cultural or academic neologisms, to functional or grammatical vocabulary that is seldom recognized as borrowed.

The phonological structure of Vietnamese is also unlike many of its living relatives in the Austroasiatic family of languages (spoken in mainland Southeast Asia). For instance, Vietnamese expresses a generally monosyllabic structure, as well as a full-blown tonal system--characteristics notably shared with the Kra-Dai (formerly known as Tai-Kadai) and Sinitic (Chinese) language families, both of which are heavily represented in the region.

In fact, Vietic, Kra-Dai, and Sinitic languages all mingle in precisely the area of modern northern Vietnam and its hilly environs, which is a suspicious coincidence, when considering the structural features and vocabulary shared across these three families. So Lost Tongues began with the question: how do we make sense of the Sinitic features of Vietnamese? And what can that linguistic history tell us about the social, cultural, and political history of the region?

Q: If you had to distill it, what’s the central argument or theme readers should take away?
 An enormous amount of work has been done on the history of Vietnamese and its relationship to various Sinitic languages, and in many ways, I hope that my book is a tribute to that work. What I believe I have contributed is to demonstrate that the Sinitic imprint observable on modern Vietnamese language can only be understood as resulting from sustained bilingualism between the genealogical ancestor of modern Vietnamese (what I call "Ancient Northern Vietic" but what is often called "Proto-Viet-Muong"), and a hitherto undescribed dialect of Chinese that became, for all intents and purposes, a native language of the Red River Plain over the 1st millennium CE. That Sinitic dialect, I call "Annamese Middle Chinese."

Eventually, Annamese Middle Chinese died out, as the speaker population of the Red River Plain "shifted" over many generations from pervasive bilingualism, to a society that no longer spoke Chinese. However, the (Vietic) language that emerged, was one radically sinicized in the process--creating what we now call the Vietnamese language.

The key evidence for this hypothesis lies in a reexamination of the phonological features of a specific stratum of Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary that I present in Chapter 5, and which I show must have resulted from pervasive spoken bilingualism, rather than limited linguistic contact or a literary or textual route of influence.

These linguistic arguments, in turn, demonstrate the profound diversity of the medieval Sinitic empires from the vantage of the Far South, an integral and often overlooked cultural and economic constituency of those polities. Finally, this linguistic history also supports the view that the independent Vietnamese polities that arose after the fall of the Tang Dynasty (10th century) were, fundamentally, (complex, diverse) Sinitic societies rapidly transforming under the drastically altered conditions of economic and political separation from the empire.

Most broadly, I hope Lost Tongues serves as a reminder of how differently language, society, and identity were conceived of in history, and how very much we tend to distort our understanding of these past worlds, using the language, categories, and concepts of modernity.

3. Structure & Process

Q: How did you structure the research in this book? Why did you decide to structure it this way?
 Lost Tongues employs both linguistic and historical methodologies, and the book is designed so that readers with different interests can navigate its content easily. It is my hope that readers of multiple disciplines will be able to access the main arguments of the book, while focusing on the specific or technical arguments of their particular interest, should they wish. Indeed, I hope that general audiences will be able to appreciate the overarching concepts of the book while different specialists engage with the technical support and evidence for those arguments.

Toward this end, the first two chapters provide overviews of the Vietic and Sinitic language families, as well as the relevant states of the field. Beginning in Chapter 3, I start each chapter with an overview of the historical, social, and cultural context of the period under discussion, followed in turn by the technical linguistic arguments.

Chapters 3, 5, and 6 focus on the three main chronological strata of Chinese loanwords in Vietnamese, which I call: Early Sino-Vietnamese (Chapter 3), Late Sino-Vietnamese (Chapter 5), and Recent Sino-Vietnamese (Chapter 6). The key evidence for the book's main arguments focus on Late Sino-Vietnamese (presented in Chapter 5).

Chapter 4 provides a critical discussion of the nature of multilingualism in the medieval Sinitic empires, with a special focus on the emergence of a literary language in the form of what we now call "Literary Sinitic" ("Literary Chinese" or, less accurately, "Classical Chinese").

Lost Tongues engages on multiple levels--sociopolitical history, literary history, and of course, phonological history. Each of these records are investigated first on their own terms, but then assembled to achieve what I hope is a more complete and compelling portrait of human interaction in the medieval Far South than would have otherwise been possible. I hope that the structure of the book will allow readers to engage at any or all of these levels.

Q: What was the most challenging part of the research or writing process?
 One blessing of a challenge was to wade through the great wealth of scholarship on different aspects of this topic, which is a testimony to the talent and vigor of generations of scholarship on Vietnam and China.

Intellectually, perhaps the most challenging part was to make sense of the phonological features that define what I call "Late Sino-Vietnamese", many of which have been observed for decades by linguists. These features, each interesting and distinctive, were difficult to reconcile with each other into a coherent explanation of the nature of Sino-Vietnamese phonology.

Then, to realize that they could easily be understood as deriving from a spoken dialect of Middle Chinese, and that a scenario of pervasive bilingualism and eventual language shift could, furthermore, easily explain the Sinitic elements in modern Vietnamese, felt sudden, surprising. I remembered the work of renowned linguist Nguyễn Tài Cẩn, who first suggested that a form of Chinese must have been spoken in the Red River Plain over the 1st Millennium, but how he, constrained by the nationalist ideation of his times, could not permit that theory to grow beyond the idea of a language spoken by a tiny minority, transmitted only via classroom learning.

That is when I realized how very much modern notions of nationalist ideation inhibit even great thinkers. I hope Lost Tongues stands as a tribute to scholars such as Nguyễn Tài Cẩn, Henri Maspero, Wang Li, Michel Ferlus, and many others, whose work remains an enduring foundation for all of us exploring the history of Sino-Vietnamese.

4. Reader Takeaways

Q: Who do you imagine as the audience for this book?
 I hope that Lost Tongues will appeal to historical linguists, to historians of both China and Vietnam, and to all readers who are interested in scrutinizing how very alien--and yet recognizable--past human societies are, when compared with our modern world. I also hope that the book breaks down the boundaries between historical linguistics and history as disciplines, and encourages more interdisciplinary collaboration in the future. Finally, I especially hope Lost Tongues will break down the walls between what we consider "Chinese" and "Vietnamese" history--categories that make absolutely no sense when applied to the 1st millennium.

Q: What do you hope readers will be thinking about after finishing it?
 I hope that readers will walk away from Lost Tongues with an awareness of the constrictive nature of modern categories like "China" and "Vietnam", "East" versus "Southeast Asia", et cetera. I hope they will have learned something specific about the histories of the Vietic and Sinitic languages, and of the Far South over the 1st millennium.

Finally, I hope that maybe they will put the book down with a taste of the strangeness of human history and the complexity of language. But mostly, I just hope they read it!

 John Phan will be at Harvard September 12, 2025 for a Book Talk about Lost Tongues of the Red River for more information click here