The Ethnic Minorities of Vietnam, Migrations to Vietnam Prior to the 10th Century AD

Welcome back to the series about the Ethnic Minorities of Vietnam. If you haven’t already, please check out the first article before you read this one because it provides a brief introduction to what scientists can tell us about the pre-history of the region and explains why ethnic minorities usually live in the mountains.¹ This article picks up where prehistory ends and primarily focuses on tribal groups that have come to Vietnam prior to and during the Chinese occupation that ended in the 10th century AD.

Austro-Asiatic Language Family

There are three major language families that exist in Vietnam. The most dominant of these languages is the Austro-Asiatic language family. From this family emerges the Việt-Mường, Môn-Khmer, Thái and Ka-đai language groups. These people could be thought of as the main indigenous groups of Vietnam as well as the rest of Southeast Asia when the first Neolithic migrations started to expand into the region. These ethnicities and their migrations are occasionally mentioned in Chinese history to help us trace some of their history after this group migrated south out of Central China.

The Việt and Mường

The Việt people are the largest ethnic group in Vietnam, making up 85% of the population of the country today. The Mường are less numerous, but still make up 1.5% of the population. There are a couple other ethnic minorities that find their origins in this language group, the Chứt and the Thổ, but these groups are very small. The Thổ people broke off of the Việt line during a time of political instability in the 17th century and they mixed with the Cuối people to form a new community. The Chứt people are an even smaller minority whose origins are uncertain because they were only identified in 1954.

Although modern day Vietnamese people take much pride in having a culture that extends for thousands of years prior to the Chinese occupation from 111 BC until the year 939. The truth is that the Viet people are as much Chinese as they are indigenous. When you compare the Viet culture that existed prior to the Chinese occupation to that of the Mường people, you can see how dramatically the post occupation culture has changed. Prior to Chinese occupation, the Viet and Mường people were nearly the same culture. Their origin myths and cultures are now completely different. The Mường people were able to hold onto much of their cultural identity by living in the mountains while the Viet people have been completely transformed by the end of their thousand year occupation.

Much of the Vietnamese language originated during the Chinese occupation. The Chinese introduced writing to the Việt people whose language transitioned from a polysyllabic and non-tonal original language into the monosyllabic and tonal language of modern Vietnamese. Vietnamese scholars also adapted their grammar to fit modified Chinese characters to form the writing style of Chữ Nôm.² This writing system takes Chinese characters that sound like Vietnamese words and modify them into new characters to represent Vietnamese words. As I mentioned earlier, approximately a third of modern Vietnamese vocabulary and nearly 60% of formal Vietnamese can find word origins in Chinese.³

Môn-Khmer Group Origins

Academics give this group a couple different names. The name mentioned in the book Ethnic Minorities in Vietnam⁴ is the Môn-Khmer group while the Wikipedia⁵ describes this group as Austroasiatic (non-Vietic). I prefer Môn-Khmer. It seems more descriptive.

The Môn-Khmer group contain 21 different ethnicities in Vietnam and make up nearly 2.6 million people as of the 2019 census.⁶ The largest ethnic minority in this group are the Khmer people. This is the ethnic group that formed the Khmer empire and also formed much of the base of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia following the 1975 revolution. The Khmer people mostly inhabit the Mekong Delta, south of Ho Chi Minh City. The Khmer people are the largest Môn-Khmer minority and represent nearly half of the total group.

The 20 other Môn-Khmer minorities are mountain people and populate the Central Highlands Mountains and the Northwestern mountains west of Hanoi near the Laotian border. In the map below, you can see that most of the area where these Môn-Khmer tribes live were once controlled by the Khmer empire around 900 AD.

The next few decades would bring great upheaval when Vietnam would gain their independence while the Khmer and Tang Empires fell. Vietnam partially gained their independence as an tributary state to the Tang in 905 and became a fully autonomous country in 939. China’s land borders were substantially reduced as they entered their Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period from 907-979 when they fractured into many separate entities that were run by several different warlords.

Jembezmamy made this map for Wikipedia of the Khmer empire around the year 900.

After the Khmer, the Ba Na are the next largest Môn-Khmer minority with a population of a little over 200,000. The majority of these Môn-Khmer minority groups are incredibly small and range in size from a little over 300 to a little over 40,000.

Thái and Ka-đai Group Origins

The Thái and Ka-đai language groups contain 12 different ethnic minorities, with eight speaking Tày-Thái and four speaking Ka-đai. The Ka-đai language is based on Tày-Thái with elements of Môn-Khmer and Malayo-Polynesian mixed in. These tribal people live in the mountainous region along the north-west borders with Yunnan, China and Laos. Some have noted the similarities between the two largest of these minority groups, the Tày and Thái (each of which have populations over 1.5 million) and have tried to prove that these two groups are actually the same, but the Vietnamese government continues to classify these minorities as two separate groups.

Around 3,200 years ago. The early Thái and Ka-đai groups likely started in central China and migrated south along the eastern Chinese coast into Southern China and Northern Vietnam. Early in the Chinese occupation of Vietnam, around 1,900 years ago, the Thái and Ka-đai groups were pushed to the west and south into the countries of modern day Laos and Northern Thailand. ⁷

In Vietnam, the Lào are a small minority and live along the Vietnamese-Laos border, with slightly less than 15,000 people. It is a different story on the other side of the border where they are the ethnic majority. When Thailand occupied Laos just prior to the French occupation, they found the country easy to occupy because their languages are very similar.

Austronesian Language Family

Chamic, the language of the Chăm people, exists as a “linguistic enclave” among the other language families that populate Southeast Asia. It mostly exists only in parts of Vietnam as a remnant of the Sa Huỳnh people who migrated to Vietnam from Borneo. ⁸

The Cham were a seafaring people with most of their settlements along the coast. They had plenty of contact with the southern Malay islands. Champa and the southern Malay empire were in contact for a couple thousand years, leading to plenty of cultural, linguistic and genetic exchange between the cultures. This seems to be the conclusion of a 2006 paper entitled Archaeology and culture in Southeast Asia: unraveling the Nusantao. ⁹ A 2012 genetic study, Patrilineal Perspective on the Austronesian Diffusion in Mainland Southeast Asia, confirms an incredibly complicated history of the Cham people. They had genetic links to all of South and East Asia, from India to Taiwan, but researchers call for more research before they can state something more conclusive. ¹⁰

The Champa Empire were the historic enemy of the Việt. Following Vietnamese independence from the Chinese during the Tang Dynasty, the new Viet Empire set their eyes on removing their southern competition. Champa became established in the second century and endured until 1471 when the empire was driven to a small state called Panduranga at the border with the former Khmer empire that fell only a few decades earlier. For decades, this territory remained mostly unclaimed. Both the Chinese and Vietnamese established cities and colonies on the former Khmer territory. This land would later become Southern Vietnam and parts of Cambodia. From this land, the remnant of the Cham people were free to establish their own settlements.

The Vietnamese government lists five minorities from the Malayo-Polynesian Group; Chăm, Chu Ru, Ê Đê, Gia Rai and Raglay. Many of the Cham people have faced severe persecution from the Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge governments in the late 1970’s. The Khmer Rouge specifically targeted minority groups for extermination, including the Cham. Among the groups targeted by the genocide, the Cham suffered the most with approximately 100,000 out of the 250,000 Cambodian Cham exterminated. Many of the survivors have fled as refugees to anyone who would take them, with 50,000 refugees fleeing to Malaysia and many fleeing to the US where they would mostly settle around Seattle, Washington. ¹¹

Today, the Ê Đê and Gia Rai are the largest Malayo-Polynesian speaking minorities in Vietnam, with Chăm ranking in third place. One and a quarter million people of Malayo-Polynesian ancestry live in Vietnam. The Chăm make up less than 15% of this number. I consider these ethnic minorities to be part of the original Champa empire. It is my understanding that the Cham empire had a similar organizational structure to the Malay empire. Both would have had a collection of local kings who swore allegiance to the main king for mutual benefit and free trade.¹² This would imply that even though these people were from different tribes, they would have been part of the larger Cham alliance.

Next Article

The next article will discuss tribal groups immigrating from China following Vietnam’s independence in the late 10th century. It will also include a discussion about the many descendants of people who came to Vietnam during the French cosmopolitan era that started in the mid 19th century. This multicultural influence introduced international visitors to Vietnam who have left behind their cultural influence along with genetic additions to the genepool.

1. Highlands versus Lowlands, an introduction to the Ethnic Minorities of Vietnam

2. Chữ Nôm used modified Mandarin characters which sound similar to Vietnamese words to create new characters for Vietnamese scholars. Proficiency in this written language was rare, with less than 5% of the population being able to read it. The language could only be mastered after first mastering written Mandarin.

3. John DeFrancis; 1977. Colonialism and language policy in Viet Nam

4. Nghiêm Vạn Đặng, Chu Thái Sơn, Lưu Hùng; 2019. Ethnic Minorities in Vietnam

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_Vietnam

6. Here is a link to the Wikipedia page that contains the most recent Vietnamese census of ethnic groups.

7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Laos

8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa_Huỳnh_culture

9. Solheim WG, Bulbeck D, Flavel A. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press; 2006. Archaeology and culture in Southeast Asia: unraveling the Nusantao

10. Jun-Dong He, Min-Sheng Peng, Huy Ho Quang, Khoa Pham Dang, An Vu Trieu, Shi-Fang Wu, Jie-Qiong Jin, Robert W Murphy, Yong-Gang Yao, Ya-Ping Zhang, Editor: Manfred Kayser, 2012. Patrilineal Perspective on the Austronesian Diffusion in Mainland Southeast Asia

PMCID: PMC3346718 PMID: 22586471

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3346718/#pone.0036437-Solheim1

11. https://iexaminer.org/getting-to-know-the-regions-cham-community/

12. the Srivijaya (7th–13th century) section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Malaysia