Digitizing Việt Nam would like to share an upcoming online event from the Library of Congress Southeast Asia Collection, bringing together research on language, orality, literacy, and social life in the uplands of Vietnam and Laos.

“Strategies of Communication in the Uplands of Vietnam and Laos” features Dr. Nathan Badenoch and Dr. Hồ Thành Tâm, who will discuss how ethnic minority communities navigate remarkable linguistic diversity and how oral and written practices shape social relationships, knowledge, and ways of recounting the past.

Drawing on his research in Northern Laos, Dr. Nathan Badenoch will explore multilingualism as an everyday social practice. In a region where people move dynamically between languages depending on social context, the spoken word and oral culture continue to provide an important shared foundation. Despite growing pressure from the national language, these multilingual practices demonstrate the continuing importance of smaller languages to the resilience of upland societies.

Turning to the Central Highlands of Vietnam, Dr. Hồ Thành Tâm will examine the emergence of literacy practices amid expanding missionary activity and colonial governance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first Latin-based writing systems for upland communities were developed with the support of French Catholic missionaries and subsequently expanded through Protestant missionary activity. These scripts did more than introduce new ways of recording knowledge: they contributed to a broader sociolinguistic transformation in how communities communicated, organized social relations, and represented their histories, accompanying a gradual shift from predominantly oral communication toward increasingly text-based practices.

The event also highlights the Asian Division’s Lesser Known Languages Collection, a distinctive Library of Congress collection containing materials in approximately 200 languages. Together, the two presentations invite us to consider the relationship between language, media, and historical memory—and what archives of lesser-known languages can reveal about the diverse ways communities produce and transmit knowledge.
 
Q&A session will follow the presentations, offering participants an opportunity to engage directly with the researchers.

August 25, 2026

8:00–9:30 p.m. EDT

7:00–8:30 a.m., August 26 (Vietnam time)

Online via Zoom

Registration:

https://loc.zoomgov.com/.../reg.../WN_eKx0_sueRGyz1W1Ea7G3dQ