Prof. John Phan, Associate Professor of Vietnamese Humanities at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, is a leading expert in East Asian language history. He will visit Singapore to discuss his first book: Lost Tongues of the Red River: Annamese Middle Chinese & the Origins of the Vietnamese Language. The book discusses the emergence of Vietnamese from various influences including Middle Chinese. CAA Singapore, together with the Harvard Club of Singapore, invite you to join a fascinating discussion on language in Southeast Asia.

Event Details

Date: Saturday, April 5

Time: 3:00-5:00pm

Location: Handlebar, 10 Lock Rd, Gillman Barracks, Singapore 108938

Tickets: registration is free, but participants are expected to purchase food and drinks at Ida's Bar

Special Offer for Lost Tongues of the Red River: Annamese Middle Chinese & the Origins of the Vietnamese Language

You can purchase Prof. Phan's book with a 20% discount with promo code ACS25 through this link.

About Prof. Phan

Prof. John Phan is Associate Professor of Vietnamese Humanities in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. He completed his M.A. at Columbia University in Ming-Qing vernacular fiction in 2005, and his Ph.D. on issues in Sino-Vietnamese contact at Cornell University in 2012. Phan is a language historian focused on the ways in which the history of spoken language, literary language, and/or writing systems can document social, cultural and political realities of the premodern and early modern worlds. He is especially interested in how language reveals histories that challenge and/or complicate our modern, nation-oriented understanding of politics, society, and identity. His first book, entitled Lost Tongues of the Red River: Annamese Middle Chinese & the Origins of the Vietnamese Language, demonstrates the existence of a dialect of Middle Chinese native to the region of modern-day northern Vietnam, and its role in the development of the Vietnamese
language. 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. In addition to the nature of linguistic contact, and broad issues in linguistic change and historical phonology as they pertain to broader historical issues, he is keenly interested in the cultural and intellectual ramifications of multiple languages coexisting in single East Asian societies, of linguistic pluralism in general, and of the transformation of oral languages into written literary mediums in historically diglossic cultures of East and Southeast Asia.