Dr. Nguyễn Tô Lan: "Chữ Nôm: Script Ideology and Language Preservation Strategies among the Kinh (Việt) Minority in Southern China" - Dr. To Lan Nguyen - Universität Hamburg
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11.07.2025
Dr. Nguyễn Tô Lan: "Chữ Nôm: Script Ideology and Language Preservation Strategies among the Kinh (Việt) Minority in Southern China"
About the lecture:
The Jing people (Viet., dân tộc Kinh), an officially recognized ethnic minority in China, are primarily concentrated in Jiangping Town, Dongxing City, within the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Their heritage language, Jingyu (Viet., tiếng Kinh), constitutes a regional variant of Vietnamese. In recent decades, Jingyu has faced intensifying pressure from dominant languages, including Mandarin Chinese, regional Sinitic dialects, and standardized Vietnamese. As a result, the language is now critically endangered.
In response to the imminent threat of linguistic extinction, a group of elder Jing intellectuals has initiated efforts to preserve and transmit Jingyu through the adoption of dien-da-dong-hung-2015-hoi-truyen-thua-chu-nom—a logographic script historically used to represent Vietnamese prior to the introduction of the Romanized Vietnamese—Quốc ngữ. The presentation, based on sociolinguistic fieldwork conducted in 2015 across the so-called "Three Islands" inhabited by the Jing community, offers a preliminary examination of the ideological and sociocultural motivations underpinning the community’s selection of Chữ Nôm as a medium of linguistic preservation. It further investigates the mechanisms by which this script is being transmitted across generations.
A comparative analysis reveals that Chữ Nôm, a script derived from the Chinese character system, lacks the phonemic transparency and orthographic efficiency characteristic of the modern Vietnamese script. Consequently, it offers limited practical utility for the accurate phonological representation and effective transmission of Jingyu. This study argues that the selection of Chữ Nôm is not grounded in linguistic functionality but rather reflects deeper ethnonationalist considerations. Specifically, the script's use reinforces the Jing people's genealogical and cultural affiliation with the Sino-character tradition, positioning their identity within a broader Han-centric sociocultural narrative.
About the lecturer:
Dr. NGUYỄN Tô Lan is currently a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences (VASS) since 2024 (formerly a Researcher at the Institute of Sino-Nom Studies, also under VASS from 2004-2024). She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics and Literature from the Graduate Academy of Social Sciences, Vietnam, in 2012.
She was firstly awarded as a ASIA Fellow (2010–2011) to conduct a comparative study in China. She later held several visiting and research fellowships, including: Visiting Scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute (2013–2014), Guest Scholar at the Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University (2014), Coordinating Research Scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute (2015), Visiting Scholar at Academia Sinica (2018), Visiting Scholar at Beijing Foreign Studies University (2019), and Visiting Researcher at Toyo Bunko, Japan (2023). In 2025, she was selected as a Petra Kappert Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC), University of Hamburg.
Her research focuses on Chữ Nôm, comparative literature, translation studies, transcultural studies, and the study of overseas minorities—particularly Overseas Chinese in Southern Vietnam, Overseas Vietnamese in Guangxi (China), and Overseas Vietnamese in Bangkok (Thailand). She also works extensively on Buddhism and print culture in East Asia.
Her major publications include a co-authored monograph with Rostislav Berezkin (Fudan University), Avalokiteśvara of the Vietnamese Sea: Miaoshan-Guanyin Legend in Vietnam (Vietnam University of Education Publishing House, 2021), and a book chapter in Ecologies of Translation in East and Southeast Asia, 1600–1900, edited by Li Guo, Patricia Sieber, and Peter Kornicki (University of Amsterdam Press, 2022). She has published over 80 scholarly articles and book chapters in Vietnamese, Chinese, English, and Japanese.
Dr. NGUYỄN Tô Lan may be contacted via lanhannom@gmail.com (Please refer to this lecture video when doing so!).
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