The Weatherhead East Asian Institute congratulates faculty member John D. Phan, Associate Professor of Vietnamese Humanities in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and a co-founder of Global Vietnam Studies at Columbia University, on the publication of his first book.

Released by the Harvard University Asia Center this spring, the evocatively titled Lost Tongues of the Red River: Annamese Middle Chinese and the Origins of the Vietnamese Language uncovers the emergence of Vietnamese under the influence of a lost Sinitic (Chinese) language Professor Phan calls “Annamese Middle Chinese,” native to an area of northern Vietnam, in the early centuries of the second millennium C.E.

Professor Phan says that although Lost Tongues of the Red River is rooted in a premodern Southeast Asia, it centers on a set of concerns that are highly relevant to the work of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Revealing the Vietnamese language’s tangled roots in an older Sinitic language, Lost Tongues situates it in a cosmopolitan, linguistically shifting milieu that doesn’t align with nation-state borders on any map.

By unearthing this multilingual mixed society, the book refutes what Professor Phan describes as a “very modern mindset”—the idea that “language, nation, culture, and ethnicity all form a monolithic block,” which in his view “doesn’t conform to reality.”

“Language shows us that modern nation-state configurations of identity can have a destructive or limiting influence on how we understand the ancient past.”

Professor Phan has lived with this material for many years. The book is rooted in the dissertation that he defended at Cornell in 2012, and he submitted a first draft of the manuscript during the Covid-19 pandemic.

For this monograph, Professor Phan drew on linguistic, philological, and historical methodologies. He conducted field work in north central Vietnam, excavating languages of the Mường, Vietnam’s third-largest minority, and also drew on the archives of the Institute for Sino-Nom Studies in Hanoi, the largest collection of Sino-Vietnamese manuscripts in the world.

How does it feel to have completed his first book? “It’s important to have things in a published, material form,” he tells us, “out in the wild, where other scholars can interact with it.”

Professor Phan goes further into his motivations for writing Lost Tongues of the Red River in an extensive (and highly recommended) June interview with Columbia News. In that conversation he also shares some recommendations from his recent reading and, even better, offers a preview of his next book project. That book will bring Professor Phan’s research up into the 17^th and 18th centuries by tracking the rise of Vietnam’s vernacular language, in the form of the Chữ Nôm character script, and demonstrating how that vernacular enabled the creation of “new forms of literature.”