Editor’s note: Anna Nguyen’s essay “A Dead Language” turns on an offhand slight, “No one speaks Vietnamese,” and worries it into grief, form, and theory. Between a father’s aphasic silence and a mother’s nightly monologues, Vietnamese persists. English, institutional and analytic, both wounds and equips. The poem of the same title makes loss speak.
[ESSAY & POETRY] “A Dead Language” by Anna Nguyen
Sometime in 2006, when I was still an undergraduate, I was on campus studying with two classmates from my Mandarin Chinese class. They were young white men, both intensely eager to learn East Asian languages. One, in particular, claimed that he was nearly fluent in Japanese and would be an ideal candidate for employment once he had mastered Mandarin. The other received this boast with encouragement.
I, irritated, remarked that I spoke Vietnamese, my parents’ language and the one I spoke primarily at home.
Without looking directly at me, he said, “No one speaks Vietnamese.”
The classmate with grand ambitions fell silent. Without looking directly at me, he said, “No one speaks Vietnamese.”
Four simple words, yet I remember them with startling clarity. As a self-righteous student, I regarded his dismissal as patently false. My parents and I spoke Vietnamese. I spoke it whenever I visited a Vietnamese-owned business. Now, as a self-questioning writer whose research engages with linguistic fracture, hierarchy, diaspora, mistranslation, and misunderstanding, I return to that moment differently.
I have several stories that informed my poem “A Dead Language.” Losing my father to a second stroke was among the most painful experiences of my life. I watched him lose his language, his Vietnamese whispers gradually receding. He was in pain, yet he could not articulate it, and during his speech-therapy appointments I could not translate that pain from Vietnamese into English.
I find myself contemplating the death of language, or more precisely, how I might sustain my Vietnamese once my mother departs this world.
After his death, there was a period when Vietnamese itself broke my heart. I dreamt repeatedly of my father and his lost speech. Now I find myself contemplating the death of language, or more precisely, how I might sustain my Vietnamese once my mother departs this world. For the past decade I have telephoned her nightly. The ritual is constant, though the conversations are often laborious. She delivers long, uninterrupted soliloquies, and I become her captive audience, unable to interject. Her stories are endless and minutely detailed. Although I am sometimes impatient with what feels like self-absorption, I remind myself that she sits alone in her house. She wishes to speak, and she should. I try to listen, to follow narratives that drift from coherence. Often, when she speaks of former neighbours and of her old home in Vietnam, I realise that I do not fully understand what she is trying to say.
I do not know her hopes, her desires, or her dreams. It feels too late to ask, and in any case she would not permit it. Ours is not a relationship conducted in the language of emotions.
And so I am grateful simply to listen to her, in the language I spoke almost exclusively as a young child.
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The act of speaking another language is not inherently anti-colonial if the speaker remains complicit in an oppressive system.
Beyond my family life, I consider how non-Western languages are glamorised or deployed strategically to signify otherness. The act of speaking another language is not inherently anti-colonial if the speaker remains complicit in an oppressive system.
There is a sceptical scholar within me who questions what fluency truly entails and why I attempt to write in a language that resists written expression yet feels natural in speech. I cannot write Vietnamese fluently, nor do I attempt to do so. English is that language for me, the language of theory. It is also the language in which I struggle most, where English speakers insist that Vietnamese is not my first language because they conflate the language of home with the language of institutions, where they claim that I did not experience racism, that I am excessively angry, that I misunderstand Western cultures, that I must temper my demands and perceptions.
Yet English has also shaped my sense of form and structure. Before writing “A Dead Language,” I had been reflecting on postcolonial science and technology studies scholar Shiv Visvanathan’s “An Ode to a Dying Language,” in which he observes that
… one of the tragedies of modern culture is that while all societies mourn the dead, few have mourning rituals for the death of a species, or the disappearance of a language… When a language dies, a way of life dies, a way of thinking disappears, a connection between word and world is lost.
Visvanathan argues that we tend to mourn “the death of the last speaker, treating him as a vestige of an entire past,” despite collective anxieties about the loss of regional and oral languages.
At the same time, we privilege texts, the documentation of words. While composing “A Dead Language,” I was assigned to read Glass, Irony and God by Anne Carson (1995), whose “The Glass Essay” opens the volume. Carson’s narrator endures a painful separation while drawing upon the life of Emily Brontë and classical motifs. I admired the poem’s erudition, even when its references exceeded my grasp.
Once, over dinner, I asked my partner, a philosopher of science, what he knew of Latin. Rather than respond directly, he offered one of his characteristic fragments of trivia, remarking that no one truly knows how Latin sounded. It survives only through scholarship, documents, and the phonological inferences of linguistic detective researchers.
This observation unsettled me, given Latin’s status as the pre-eminent academic language. It endures precisely in that capacity.
During a seminar in my poetry residency, I resolved to write a version of “A Dead Language.” The instructor, Jennifer Militello, presented several poetic forms she described as endangered and introduced us to Jericho Brown’s duplex, a sonnet form that synthesises elements of the pantoum, the sonnet, and the ghazal. The structure itself reflects the recursive processing that preoccupies me. It is perhaps my most disciplined poem, each line adhering to Brown’s rule of nine to eleven syllables.
There is an irony in writing about the possible death of a language within a text that preserves it, particularly a text my mother, who embodies these anxieties, cannot read. Yet, as I have written elsewhere, I am attempting to write about something for someone.
A Dead Language
Anna Nguyen
Everyday I hear someone’s language die
So I call my mother to make sure she’s there.
Her TV is too loud, but she’s there.
She repeats the first clause of every sentence.
Latin is spoken in a wooden sentence,
A theoretical language, living in texts.
I can barely say the words, they live in texts
It’s hard to believe the man at the lectern.
In the back, I sat away from the lectern
And I composed a poem for my mother.
And I composed a poem for my mother,
It’s a memento she will likely lose.
It’s a memento she will likely lose.
Everyday I hear someone’s language die.
How to cite: Nguyen, Anna. “A Dead Language.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 13 Feb. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/02/13/dead-language.
Anna Nguyen left her PhD programme and reworked her dissertation into a work of creative non-fiction while studying for an MFA at Stonecoast, University of Southern Maine. Her work brings together literary analysis, science and technology studies, and social theory to examine institutions, language, expertise, citation practices, and food. She is currently undertaking a second MFA in poetry at New England College, where she also teaches first-year composition. She is the host of the podcast Critical Literary Consumption. [All contributions by Anna Nguyen.]
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