Studies in Vietnamese Historical Linguistics

This book facilitates constructive interdisciplinary dialogue among linguistics and philology specialists concerning various languages in Vietnam, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. The book's principal objective is to investigate the interdisciplinary nature of language change, with a particular focus on analyzing the structural and socio-cultural components of the evolution of specific linguistic phenomena over time. The book concentrates on the five primary language families in the East and Southeast Asian linguistic arena, namely Austroasiatic, Tai-Kadai, Sino-Tibetan, Austronesian, and Hmong-Mien. In doing so, it develops understanding of the extent to which language change is the result of language-internal mechanisms, prolonged contact with other languages within the same linguistic area, and the surrounding socio-cultural milieu. Given that Vietnam presents a linguistic microcosm of the East and Southeast Asia region, the book is divided into two sections. The first centers on historical linguistics relating to major languages based in Vietnam, including Vietnamese and its significant neighbors, Tay and Nung. The subsequent section examines the transformations observable in other languages prevalent across East and Southeast Asia that are historically, typologically, and geographically related to languages from Vietnam, including Chinese, Formosan, and Philippine languages, as well as Hmongic languages. A product of a workshop sponsored by the Harvard Yenching Institute held at the Institute of Sino-Nom Studies, this book encompasses a significant contribution to the field of Vietnamese historical linguistics, which has been notably underexplored in academic research. It is relevant to linguists, philologists, historians, anthropologists, and cultural scholars interested in Vietnam in particular, and the Southeast and East Asian cultural and linguistic landscape at large.

Auteur

Trang Phan is an Assistant Professor at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Dr. Phan completed her doctoral studies at the University of Sheffield (England) in 2013, focusing on the structure and acquisition of Vietnamese verbal aspect. Following this, she held a postdoctoral research position with the Cartographic Syntax project at Ghent University (Belgium), where she examined various aspects of Vietnamese clausal structure in a cross-linguistic perspective. From 2020 to 2021, Dr. Phan was a visiting scholar at Harvard Yenching Institute (USA), where she conducted research on the role of Vietnamese nominals in updating our current understanding of classifier languages. She has published numerous articles in esteemed linguistic journals and publishers, in addition to co-editing the volume Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vietnamese Linguistics (John Benjamins, 2019), the Journal of Southeast Asian Linguistics Society special issue Vietnamese Linguistics: State of the Field (University of Hawai'i Press, 2022) and the special issue Progress in Vietnamese Linguistics (*Taiwan Journal of Linguistics, 2024). She is the author of the monograph *The Syntax of Vietnamese Tense, Aspect, and Negation (Routledge, 2023).

Tuan-Cuong Nguyen is a Senior Researcher and an Associate Professor in Vietnamese Sinology. He currently serves as the Director of the Institute of Sino-Nom Studies under the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences (VASS); and holds the role of Adjunct Professor of Sinology at Vietnam National University - Hanoi (VNU). In his prolific academic career, Nguyen has made significant contributions, with close to 100 journal articles and conference papers published in Vietnamese, English, Chinese, and Japanese. Furthermore, Nguyen authored and co-authored several books in Vietnamese language, including The Structure of Vietnamese Nom Script: Continuance and Mutation (Hanoi: National University-Hanoi Publishing House, 2012), and Confucian Primary Education: 'The Classic of Three Characters' and Literacy in Vietnam (Hanoi: Social Sciences Publishers, 2020). In addition to his Vietnamese publications, Nguyen has co-edited three books in Chinese, namely: Research on East Asian Sinographic Texts and Vietnamese Classical Dictionaries (Beijing: China Social Science Press, 2017), Research on Vietnamese Classical Texts and East Asian Sinographs (Beijing: China Social Science Press, 2019), New Perspectives on Vietnamese Sinology (Taipei: Student Book Co., LTD, 2023).

Masaaki Shimizu is a Professor in Vietnamese studies in the Division of Foreign Studies at the Graduate School of Humanities, Osaka University, Japan. He currently holds the position of vice-chairperson within the same division. Shimizu's scholarly contributions encompass a diverse range of works, including Chinese and Vietnamese featured in the Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics (BRILL, 2017) and several articles on Austroasiatic languages included in the Linguistic Atlas of Asia (Hituzi Syobo, 2021). He has also co-authored several books in Japanese, such as Vietnamese Grammar (Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, 2022), A Study of Sinoform Scripts: Principles of Glyph Creation (Kachosha, 2022), and Introduction to the Study of Chinese Characters (The Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation, 2018).