The transformation of fluid linguistic practices into the discrete, governable language of a nation resulted from a deliberate act of epistemic engineering. From the 1890s through the 1960s, the “problem of language” became inseparable from the construction of the modern state in East Asia. This session interrogates the socio-intellectual engagements that constituted linguistic phenomena as bounded objects of knowledge and manipulation. By bringing into conversation the histories of linguistic science, lexicography, and script reform across Meiji Japan, colonial Korea, and the People’s Republic of China, the panel illuminates how intellectual inquiry, institutional intervention, and political mobilization co-produced what may be understood as modern linguistic regimes.

SeungHyeon Pyo’s paper investigates the circulation of German linguistic science, particularly the Neogrammarian program, into Meiji Japan. It centers on how comparative methodology and phonocentric assumptions reorganized speech into a systematic object of inquiry. Reading Ueda Kazutoshi (1867-1937)’s 1895 lecture notes in relation to the Neogrammarian methodology, Pyo contends that purportedly universal and scientific mechanisms of speech worked to reify ethno-racial distinction, while simultaneously rendering language amenable to classification and state institutionalization.

This intellectual genealogy, however, was rarely a straight line of succession. Ross King reorients the narrative by tracking the underexamined influence of Georg von der Gabelentz (1840-1893) on Ueda’s linguistic project. Highlighting the “last gasp of the Humboldtian tradition” (Hutton, 1995) within Gabelentz’s thought, King demonstrates how these selective German reconfigurations gave rise to a distinct formation of “National Language Studies” (kugŏhak/kokugogaku). This epistemic infrastructure provided the methodological blueprint for linguistic inquiry across Japan’s colonial peripheries in Korea and Taiwan well into the twentieth century.

If these first two papers illustrate the discursive field of linguistic nationalism, Yelee An’s contribution turns to the institutional consolidation of these developments through lexicography. Through an analysis of the 1938 Chosŏnŏ sajŏn by Mun Seyŏng, the first general-purpose monolingual Korean dictionary, An reveals how the drive for standardization materialized into a concrete reference work. Her research shows how lexical selection and categorization worked to delimit the scope of “legitimate” language use. Under colonial conditions, the dictionary became the primary locus where national awakening met the material requirements of lexical governance.

This process takes a distinct form in the mid-twentieth century, as linguistic standardization is rearticulated within the political idiom of socialist mass mobilization, where the object of language is anchored not in the nation as such, but in the project of “the people” under socialist transformation. Lorraine Wong brings the analysis into the realm of political practice by examining script reform in the People’s Republic of China during the 1950s and 1960s. Focusing on the politicization of script under the banner of the “mass line,” Wong situates phoneticization and simplification within the dynamics of socialist transformation. She reveals how script reform navigated the shifting relations between cultural policy and socialist construction across various socio-political desiderata.

Viewed together, these four papers argue that linguistic regimes in East Asia arose through the interaction of transnational epistemic frameworks and evolving political imperatives. By reconstructing this process across multiple sites, the session offers a historically grounded account of how language was made into an object of knowledge and a target of governance, with equal attention to regional specificities. In so doing, we contribute to broader humanities debates regarding the relationship between knowledge formation, modernity, and the state, addressing how the construction of the “linguistic nation” remains one of the most enduring legacies of the twentieth century.

This session follows the regular panel time allotment of four 13-minute presentations, followed by 15 minutes of open discussion. Bringing together scholars working on Japan, Korea, and China from different methodological backgrounds, including intellectual history, historical linguistics, and literary-cultural analysis, the panel reflects a deliberate effort to assemble a diverse set of voices while maintaining the collective focus linguistic modernity.