Re-Imagining "Annam": A New Analysis of Sino–Viet–Muong Linguistic Contact

Abstract

This article examines the linguistic boundaries that separated (or united) Medieval China’s southern territories and the river plains of northern Vietnam at the end of the first millennium C.E. New evidence from Sino–Vietnamese vocabulary demonstrates the existence of a regional dialect of Middle Chinese, spoken in the Ma, Ca, and Red River plains. Preliminary analysis suggests that a “language shift” away from this “Annamese Middle Chinese” in favor of the local, non-Chinese language, was largely responsible for the highly sinicized lexicon of modern Vietnamese. This theory, which challenges the tradition of an essentially literary source for Sino–Vietnamese, may help to explain some of the sinicized features of Vietnamese phonology and syntax as well. The last section of the article presents a tentative hypothesis for the formal emergence of Vietnamese contra its closest relative, Muong. These hypotheses require further testing, and are presented here as a first look at the history of the languages of “Annam”.