Contents -- Contributors -- Introduction: Languages in East and South Asia, 1000-1919 -- Benjamin A. Elman -- The Vernacularization of Buddhist Texts: From the Tangut Empire to Japan -- Peter Kornicki -- The Sounds of Our Country: Interpreters, Linguistic Knowledge, and the Politics of Language in Early Chosŏn Korea -- Wang Sixiang -- Rebooting the Vernacular in Seventeenth-Century Vietnam -- John D. Phan -- Mediating the Literary Classics: Commentary and Translation in Premodern Japan -- Haruo Shirane -- The Languages of Medical Knowledge in Tokugawa Japan -- Daniel Trambaiolo -- The Manchu Script and Information Management: Some Aspects of Qing China's Great Encounter with Alphabetic Literacy -- Mårten Söderblom Saarela -- Unintended Consequences of Classical Literacies for the Early Modern Chinese Civil Examinations -- Benjamin A. Elman -- Competing "Languages": "Sound" in the Orthographic Reforms of Early Meiji Japan -- Atsuko Ueda -- Writing and Speech: Rethinking the Issue of Vernaculars in Early Modern China -- Shang Wei -- Index.