Chia, Caroline & Tom Hoogervorst (eds.) (2021), Sinophone Southeast Asia: Sinitic Voices across the Southern Seas. Leiden: Brill. (original) (raw)

Conclusion 245 Index 253 This volume is based on the papers presented at the conference Rethinking Sinitic Literacy: A Study of Sinitic "Texts" in Southeast Asia (2018), co-organized by Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV). As our quotation marks around the word "texts" reveal, we approached this term in its broadest possible sense, encompassing written, spoken, and performed texts. Yet, as we realized along the way, what we had in mind is better described as "voices". The word "voice" encapsulates the three things we are interested in: the languages people use, the contents of what they say or write, and the media and other platforms through which they express themselves. We feel that the present book is more than a mainstream conference proceedings volume, although we might not be alone in proposing this claim. It is above all the result of the intellectual exchanges and long discussions that unfolded during the Q&A sessions, coffee breaks, and afterwards over the email, which encouraged each of us to rethink our assumptions, re-analyse our data, and situate our findings in a broader Southeast Asian context. We are most grateful to K.K. Luke for showing his utmost support for the conference and to Yow Cheun Hoe for hosting the event. David Holm and Randy LaPolla generously shared their broad expertise on the topic, offered suggestions for improvement, and provoked stimulating conversations. David Holm has also kindly helped us with the Chinese characters for which no Unicode exist. We also thank Suchart Setthamalinee and Low Kok Wai for their insights on the sociolinguistic complexity of, respectively, the Chinese Muslim communities in northern Thailand and Cantonese Taoist rites in Singapore. Siew Min Sai advised us during the conference and afterwards. Josh Stenberg offered valuable, detailed, and gratefully received feedback for the introduction and conclusion of this book. We have been financially supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) through a Veni grant, awarded to Tom Hoogervorst, to fund the conference and the publication of this volume. Additional funding for the conference was supplied by the Centre for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) Conference, Symposium and Workshop Scheme of NTU, awarded to Caroline Chia. Finally, we thank Chunyan Shu for guiding us through the editorial process and Kristen Chevalier for her efforts during the production of this book. 1.1 Distribution of Min languages in China. https://commons.wikimedia. org/w/index.php?curid=53124347; digitalized by Kanguole. License under CC BY-SA 4.0 22 1.2 The sea route from Portugal to the Far East. Adapted from Hugo Refachinho's map; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portuguese\_discoveries\_and _explorationsV3en.png; License under CC BY-SA 4.0 24 1.3 The spread and development of ang moh 紅毛. Own work 30 1.4 General foreign speech of the Europeans 紅毛通用番話, with a sample page.