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The Vietnamese people ( vi, người Việt, lit=Viet people) or Kinh people ( vi, người Kinh) are a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to modern-day Northern Vietnam and Southern China (Jing Islands, Dongxing, Guangxi). The native language is Vietnamese, the most widely spoken Austroasiatic language.

Vietnamese Kinh people account for just over 85.32% of the population of Vietnam in the 2019 census, and are officially known as Kinh people () to distinguish them from the other minority groups residing in the country such as the Hmong, Cham, or Mường. The Vietnamese are one of the four main groups of Vietic speakers in Vietnam, the others being the Mường, Thổ, and Chứt people. They are related to the Gin people, a Vietnamese ethnic group in China.

Terminology

According to Churchman (2010), all endonyms and exonyms referring to the Vietnamese such as ''Viet'' (related to ancient Chinese geographical imagination), ''Kinh'' (related to medieval administrative designation), or ''Keeu'' and ''Kæw'' (derived from Jiāo 交, ancient Chinese toponym for Northern Vietnam, Old Chinese ''*kraw'') by Kra-Dai speaking peoples, are related to political structures or have common origins in ancient Chinese geographical imagination. Most of the time, the Austroasiatic-speaking ancestors of the modern Kinh under one single ruler might have assumed for themselves a similar or identical social self-designation inherent in the modern Vietnamese first-person pronoun ''ta'' (us, we, I) to differentiate themselves with other groups. In the older colloquial usage, ''ta'' corresponded to "ours" as opposed to "theirs", and during colonial time they were "''nước ta''" (our country) and "''tiếng ta''" (our language) in contrast to "''nước tây''" (western countries) and "''tiếng tây''" (western languages).

Việt

The term "" (Yue) () in Early Middle Chinese was first written using the logograph "戉" for an axe (a homophone), in oracle bone and bronze inscriptions of the late Shang dynasty ( BC), and later as "越". At that time it referred to a people or chieftain to the northwest of the Shang.Theobald, Ulrich (2018
"Shang Dynasty - Political History"
in ''ChinaKnowledge.de - An Encyclopaedia on Chinese History, Literature and Art''. quote: "Enemies of the Shang state were called fang 方 "regions", like the Tufang 土方, which roamed the northern region of Shanxi, the Guifang 鬼方 and Gongfang 𢀛方 in the northwest, the Qiangfang 羌方, Suifang 繐方, Yuefang 戉方, Xuanfang 亘方 and Zhoufang 周方 in the west, as well as the Yifang 夷方 and Renfang 人方 in the southeast." In the early 8th century BC, a tribe on the middle Yangtze were called the Yangyue, a term later used for peoples further south. Between the 7th and 4th centuries BC Yue/Việt referred to the State of Yue in the lower Yangtze basin and its people. From the 3rd century BC the term was used for the non-Chinese populations of south and southwest China and northern Vietnam, with particular ethnic groups called Minyue, Ouyue (Vietnamese: Âu Việt), Luoyue (Vietnamese: Lạc Việt), etc., collectively called the Baiyue (Bách Việt, ; ). The term Baiyue/Bách Việt first appeared in the book '' Lüshi Chunqiu'' compiled around 239 BC. According to Ye Wenxian (1990), apud Wan (2013), the ethnonym of the Yuefang in northwestern China is not associated with that of the Baiyue in southeastern China.

The late medieval period saw the rise of Vietnamese elites identified themselves with the ancient Yue in order to incline with 'an ancient origin', and that identity might have born by constructing traditions. By the 17th and 18th centuries AD, educated Vietnamese apparently referred to themselves as ''người Việt'' 𠊛越 (Viet people) or ''người Nam'' 𠊛南 (southern people).

Kinh

Beginning in the 10th and 11th centuries, a strand of Viet-Muong (northern Vietic language) with influence from a hypothetic Chinese dialect in northern Vietnam, dubbed as Annamese Middle Chinese, started to become what is now the Vietnamese language. Its speakers called themselves the "Kinh" people, meaning people of the "metropolitan" centered around the Red River Delta with Hanoi as its capital. Historic and modern Chữ Nôm scripture classically uses the Han character '京', pronounced "Jīng" in Mandarin, and "Kinh" with Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation. Other variants of Proto-Viet-Muong were driven from the lowlands by the Kinh and were called ''Trại'' (寨 Mandarin: ''Zhài''), or "outpost" people," by the 13th century. These became the modern Mường people. According to Victor Lieberman, ''người Kinh'' ( Chữ Nôm: 𠊛京) may be a colonial-era term for Vietnamese speakers inserted anachronistically into translations of pre-colonial documents, but literature on 18th century ethnic formation is lacking.

History

Origins and pre-history

The forerunners of the ethnic Vietnamese were Proto-Vietic people who descended from Proto-Austroasiatic people who may have originated from somewhere in Southern China, Yunnan, the Lingnan, or the Yangtze River, or mainland Southeast Asia, together with the Monic, who settled further to the west and the Khmeric migrated further south. Most archaeologists and linguists, and other specialists like Sinologists and crop experts, believe that they arrived no later than 2000 BC bringing with them the practice of riverine agriculture and in particular the cultivation of wet rice.Blench, Roger. 2018
Waterworld: lexical evidence for aquatic subsistence strategies in Austroasiatic
In ''Papers from the Seventh International Conference on Austroasiatic Linguistics'', 174-193. Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society Special Publication No. 3. University of Hawaii Press.Blench, Roger. 2017.
Waterworld: lexical evidence for aquatic subsistence strategies in Austroasiatic
'. Presented at ICAAL 7, Kiel, Germany.Sidwell, Paul. 2015b. ''Phylogeny, innovations, and correlations in the prehistory of Austroasiatic''. Paper presented at the workshop ''Integrating inferences about our past: new findings and current issues in the peopling of the Pacific and South East Asia'', 22–23 June 2015, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany. Some linguists (James Chamberlain, Joachim Schliesinger) suggested that the Vietic-speaking people migrated from North Central Region to the Red River Delta, which had originally been inhabited by Tai- speakers. However, Michael Churchman found no records of population shifts in Jiaozhi (centered around the Red River Delta) in Chinese sources, indicating that a fairly stable population of Austroasiatic speakers, ancestral to modern Vietnamese, inhabited in the delta during the Han- Tang periods. Other proposes that Northern Vietnam and Southern China were never homogeneous in term of ethnicity and languages, but peoples shared some customs. These ancient tribes did not have any kind of defined ethnic boundary and could not be described as "Vietnamese" (Kinh) in any satisfactory sense. Any attempt of identify an ethnic group in ancient Vietnam is problematized inaccurate.

Another theory, based on linguistic diversity, locates the most probable homeland of the Vietic languages in modern-day Bolikhamsai Province and Khammouane Province in Laos as well as parts of Nghệ An Province and Quảng Bình Province in Vietnam. In the 1930s, clusters of Vietic-speaking communities were discovered in the hills of eastern Laos, are believed to be the earliest inhabitants of that region. Archaeogenetics demonstrated that before the Dong Son period, the Red River Delta's inhabitants were predominantly Austroasiatic: genetic data from Phùng Nguyên culture's Mán Bạc burial site (dated 1,800 BC) have close proximity to modern Austroasiatic speakers such as the Khmer and Mlabri; meanwhile, "mixed genetics" from Đông Sơn culture's Núi Nấp site showed affinity to " Dai from China, Tai-Kadai speakers from Thailand, and Austroasiatic speakers from Vietnam, including the Kinh".

According to Vietnamese legend ''The Tale the Hồng Bàng Clan'' (''Hồng Bàng'' thị truyện) written in the 15th century, the first Vietnamese descended from the dragon lord Lạc Long Quân and the fairy Âu Cơ. They married and had one hundred eggs, from which hatched one hundred children. Their eldest son ruled as the Hùng king. The Hùng kings were claimed to be descended from the mythical figure Shen Nong.

Early history and Chinese rule

The ear