A New Book Traces the Rise of the Vietnamese Language

The Vietnamese language provides singular insight into the dynamism of premodern Asia. As John Phan, associate professor of Vietnamese Humanities in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, shows in his book, Lost Tongues of the Red River, modern notions of language history are often limited by nationalist narratives, focused on bolstering a specific country’s social, cultural, or political identities. A closer look at the Vietnamese language reveals a rich record of interaction and transformation, which does not fit easily within modern nation-state lines or boundaries.

By employing philological, textual, and comparative linguistic methodologies, 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, 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 emergence of Vietnamese within the broader context of East and Southeast Asia. Lost Tongues of the Red River demonstrates how language forms an intimate record of human interaction.

Columbia News recently caught up with Phan to discuss the book, as well as other books that are occupying him now, his current project, and the endless guest list for his next party.

Why did you write this book?

Besides research and professional requirements, this book was motivated by deep questions pertaining to modern identities, and the way they perhaps oppress, suppress, or distort our understanding of history. As human beings, I think we all naturally proceed from the origin point of our own individual selves, and our questions about the world are inevitably informed by our identities—as shifting and amorphous as these are. And then, hopefully, the work eventually liberates us from those limited perspectives, and reveals something beyond them. 

I certainly began this research driven by personal interests in Vietnam, in Vietnamese identity, and in the history of Vietnamese culture and language as they changed or developed over long centuries. I also came to this project with a fundamental curiosity about language, about how language operates structurally, about how it changes systematically over time, and, ultimately, about how we should understand the relationship between language, culture, and identity more broadly.

Can you give some examples from the book of how the development of the Vietnamese language reflects the dynamism of early Asia, unconstrained from nationalist narratives?

This book is fundamentally about how the modern Vietnamese language was formed, over centuries of bilingualism alongside a now lost Chinese or Sinitic language, which I call Annamese Middle Chinese. In some ways, Lost Tongues of the Red River is a linguistic account of what is often called the Period of Northern Domination, a millennium during which the area of modern-day northern Vietnam formed the southern perimeter of successive Sinitic imperial polities (or Chinese empires, more colloquially). This period is typically cast as an era of Chinese oppression over Vietnamese peoples, ending in the 10^th-century emergence of an independent Vietnamese kingdom. However, such a narrative strongly reflects modern nation-state configurations of political and cultural identity—specifically, notions of modern China and Vietnam. This story is an important part of modern Vietnamese nationhood, and there are similar components to many modern national historiographies around the world.

Yet both the linguistic and historical record describe societies in the area of modern-day northern Vietnam that should not be classified either as Chinese or Vietnamese, in the modern senses that we use those words. One concrete example of this is the fact that we tend to imagine identity as formed of single ethnicities or nationalities speaking single languages, and thus undergoing a single shared historical experience. To wit, the Chinese people speak Chinese, and the Vietnamese people speak Vietnamese (or, for that matter, the French people speak French, the Spanish people speak Spanish, and so on). This is a nationalist or nation-state configuration of identity, even when it does not strictly conform to an existing nation-state. In reality, and especially in premodern times, language does not adhere to single, discrete peoples or cultures in such a monolithic fashion. Certainly, multilingual societies were not uncommon in the premodern world, and, of course, we see many examples of them in our world today, despite the prevalence of the nation-state as a model for political, cultural, and social organization.

My book reveals the existence of a dialect of what we call Middle Chinese—a Sinitic language spoken over roughly the first millennium CE, whose features were native to the Red River Plain, and which developed there beginning in the last centuries BCE. This language—which, again, I call Annamese Middle Chinese—coexisted with the genealogical ancestor of modern Vietnamese, which I call Northern Vietic (usually called Proto-Viet-Muong), in a unified bilingual landscape composed of individuals speaking both languages, to varying degrees, at multiple levels of society. These bilingual speakers were neither Chinese nor Vietnamese.

Eventually, through complex historical processes, this society abandoned spoken Chinese in favor of a highly Sinicized dialect of Northern Vietic, in effect, producing the modern Vietnamese language. This is a history of amalgamation, of deep hybridity, and a blending of diversity. It is not a history of discrete national identities vying with one another, but a reminder that all human society is a mosaic, an alloy, or a tapestry, and that as much as we wish to divide human history and culture up into separate, polygonal shapes on a map, we cannot. Rather, language, should we permit it, will always remind us that we are creatures of interconnectivity, and that we perform and produce that interconnectivity every time we open our mouths to speak.

What books have you read lately that you would recommend, and why?

You mean other than The Lord of the Rings? Just kidding. One book I read recently is the revised and updated version of Eric H. Cline's 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. I am not a specialist in the era or the region, but I found Cline's treatment of global systemic change at the turn of the Bronze Age to be fascinating, especially his capacity to draw connections between diverse phenomena across a broad, yet interconnected world. Cline produces a portrait of an orbit of human interaction composed of many polities, an integrated territory or world with its own unique systems, norms, and ranges of diversity, which is also difficult to squeeze into modern categories of identity, politics, or culture. And that is as it should be, since the world he describes collapsed over three thousand years ago. I highly recommend!

Another book, closer to home, is Li Tana's A Maritime Vietnam: From Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century. In a similar fashion, Tana describes another hitherto unseen or unrecognized orbit of human interaction—the politically, administratively, and culturally diverse coastline of modern-day Vietnam, stretching from the Gulf of Tongking down to the regions of the Mekong—as a shifting story of global mercantile interaction from ancient times to the cusp of colonization. Her capacity to draw together vast historical detail into a comprehensive portrait of the region is staggering, and allows us to understand different societies and cultures that occupied those territories over time, through a unique structural lens, and down to a surprisingly minute level. The book is an inspiring work of scholarship.

What's next on your reading list?

I've got a pile of books about a mile high. But, not counting current research, I am hoping to get to a book by Gilles Siouffi, Paris-Babel, which examines the role of Paris in standardizing French into a political, administrative, and literary cosmopolitan language. The book was recommended to me by a very kind person who attended my book talk at Princeton, and I'm looking forward to some lazy afternoons with it (and maybe a French dictionary by my side for support). 

What are you teaching in the fall semester?

In the fall of 2025, I will be teaching two of my regular courses: Introduction to East Asian Civilizations—Vietnam (a historical and cultural survey of Vietnam from earliest times to the 19th century) and Asian Humanities—Colloquium on Major Texts (a seminar treatment of the great texts of East Asia). It is a pleasure to return to these two core undergraduate courses, and to get to work with undergrads on some of the great touchstones of Vietnamese and broader East and Southeast Asian society and culture. I also hope to launch a new seminar on the history of Vietnamese literature soon, focused on themes of suffering, retribution, and enlightenment across the canon. Stay tuned!

What are you working on now?

My current book project focuses on the development of a Vietnamese vernacular literary language, mostly over the 17th and 18th centuries. For most of history, Vietnamese elites composed in Literary Sinitic or Literary Chinese (sometimes called Classical Chinese, though this is not really accurate). Slowly, over the first half of the second millennium, a script emerged to represent the Vietnamese language that is now called Chữ Nôm 𡦂喃. My project examines how the practice of translation from Literary Sinitic into a form of vernacular Vietnamese writing using Chữ Nôm transformed the Vietnamese language into a new vehicle for literary expression.

I focus not only on the structural transformations of the Vietnamese language as a result of this process, but also the expressive transformations of the language—and, especially, the production of new genres of literature made possible by unprecedented use of vernacular language in the realm of literary expression. Finally, I also hope to connect the Vietnamese case to broader East/Southeast Asian and global cases of translation between high, cosmopolitan forms of language and local vernacular forms of language in the creation of new forms of literature.

Which three scholars/academics, dead or alive, would you invite to a dinner party, and why?

Oh, that is a tough one. Too many. Well, there are quite a few in our department, at Columbia and across the current academy, that I could, would, and/or have invited, but I guess I'll leave those great colleagues aside for the sake of the exercise. Maybe if I could create a holodeck dinner party to help with my current book project (yes, I’m a big fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation), I would invite Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Huỳnh Sanh Thông to chat about language, translation, and the creation of new literary languages. But I would also dearly love to have Henri Maspero, Wang Li, and Nguyễn Tài Cẩn over to talk about Lost Tongues of the Red River, my first book, and ask them for their advice and corrections.

No, wait! Maybe the late great Michel Ferlus, together with André Haudricourt and Cao Xuân Hạo, to discuss the current state of Vietnamese linguistics, both diachronic and synchronic? Or how about Nguyễn Trãi (a 15^th-century Vietnamese statesman), Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm (a 15^th-16^th-century Vietnamese intellectual and recluse), and Hồ Xuân Hương (an 18^th-19^th-century Vietnamese poetess) sitting down to talk about human nature and political vicissitudes? Too many to name, and I'm already putting together the drinks menu.