Viet people
The Kinh people, also known as the Viet people, are a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to modern-day northern Vietnam and southern China who speak Vietnamese, the most widely spoken Austroasiatic language.
Vietnamese Kinh people account for 85.32% of the population of Vietnam in the 2019 census, and are officially designated and recognized as the 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. Diasporic descendants of the Vietnamese in China, known as the Gin people, are one of 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China, residing in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
Terminology
According to Churchman, all endonyms and exonyms referring to the Vietnamese such as Việt, Kinh, or Keeu and Kæw 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 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" and "tiếng ta" in contrast to "nước tây" and "tiếng tây".Việt
The term "" in Early Middle Chinese was first written using the logograph "戉" for an axe, in oracle bone and bronze inscriptions of the late Shang dynasty, and later as "越". At that time it referred to a people or chieftain to the northwest of the Shang. In the early 8th century BC, a tribe on the middle Yangtze were called the Yangyue, which was later used to describe peoples living 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, Luoyue, etc., collectively called the Baiyue. The term Baiyue/Bách Việt first appeared in the book Lüshi Chunqiu compiled around 239 BC. By the 17th and 18th centuries AD, educated Vietnamese referred to themselves as người Việt ?越 or người Nam ?南.Kinh
Beginning in the 10th and 11th centuries, a strand of Viet–Muong, with influence from a hypothetical Chinese dialect in northern Vietnam, dubbed as Annamese Middle Chinese, evolved into 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, or "outpost" people", by the 13th century. These became the modern Mường people. According to Victor Lieberman, người Kinh 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 prehistoric period
According to the Vietnamese legend, The Tale of the Hồng Bàng Clan, written in the 15th century, the first Vietnamese were 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 Shennong/Thần Nông.The earliest reference of the proto-Vietnamese in Chinese annals was the Lạc, Lạc Việt, or the Dongsonian, an ancient tribal confederacy of perhaps polyglot Austroasiatic and Kra–Dai speakers who occupied the Red River Delta in northern Vietnam.
One hypothesis suggests that the forerunners of the ethnic Kinh descend from a subset of proto-Austroasiatic people in southern China, either around Yunnan, Lingnan, or the Yangtze River, as well as mainland Southeast Asia. These proto-Austroasiatics also diverged into Monic speakers, who settled further to the west, and the Khmeric speakers, who migrated further south. The Munda of northeastern India were another subset of proto-Austroasiatics who likely diverged earlier than the aforementioned groups, given the linguistic distance in basic vocabulary of the languages. Most archaeologists, linguists, and other specialists, such as 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.
Some linguists, such as James Chamberlain and Joachim Schliesinger, have suggested that Vietic-speaking people migrated northwards from the North Central Region of Vietnam to the Red River Delta, which had originally been inhabited by Tai speakers. However, Michael Churchman found no records of population shifts in Jiaozhi in Chinese sources, indicating that a fairly stable population of Austroasiatic speakers, ancestral to modern Vietnamese, inhabited the delta during the Han-Tang periods.
Another theory, based upon linguistic diversity, locates the most probable homeland of the Vietic languages in modern-day Bolikhamsai Province and Khammouane Province in Laos as well as in parts of Nghệ An Province and Quảng Bình Province in Vietnam. In the 1930s, clusters of Vietic-speaking communities discovered in the hills of eastern Laos were believed to be the earliest inhabitants of that region.
But so far, many scholars link the origin of the Vietic languages to northern Vietnam, around the Red River Delta.
Michael Churchman, Tuong Vu, and Frederic Pain argue that a distinct Vietnamese identity or language did not exist in full prior to and during the Han-Tang period. Churchman states that during this period, the tribes in northern Vietnam and southern China did not have any kind of defined ethnic boundary and could not be described as "Vietnamese" in any satisfactory sense. Vu believes that a Han-Viet group existed that spoke both a Chinese dialect called "Annamese Middle Chinese" and Proto-Viet–Muong, but the inhabitants of the Red River Valley did not have a single identity or language. Pain also argues that Vietnamese cultural identity was the result of Chinese influence on native elements that fully emerged in the post-Chinese rule period during the Song dynasty. Thus, attempts to identify ethnic groups in ancient Vietnam are problematic and often inaccurate.
Ancient to early medieval period
The Đông Sơn culture was pioneered by the Lạc Việt peoples, who also founded the Văn Lang chiefdom, ruled by the semi-mythical Hùng kings. To the south of the Dongsonians/Lạc Việt was the Sa Huỳnh culture of the Austronesian Chamic people. Around 400–200 BC, the Lạc Việt interacted with the Âu Việt, a splinter group of Tai people from southern China, and Sinitic peoples from further north. According to a late-third- or early-fourth-century AD Chinese chronicle, Thục Phán, the leader of the Âu Việt, conquered Văn Lang and deposed the last Hùng king. Having submissions of Lạc lords, Thục Phán proclaimed himself King An Dương of Âu Lạc kingdom, uniting the Lạc Việt and Âu Việt tribes.In 179 BC, Zhao Tuo, a Chinese general who established the Nanyue state in modern-day southern China, annexed Âu Lạc, which initiated Sino-Vietic interaction that lasted for a millennium. In 111 BC, the Han Empire conquered Nanyue, which also brought northern Vietnam under Han rule.
By the 7th century to 9th century AD, as the Tang Empire ruled over the region, historians such as Henri Maspero proposed that Vietnamese-speaking people became separated from other Vietic groups such as the Mường and Chứt due to heavier Chinese influences on the Vietnamese. In the mid-9th century, local rebels aided by Nanzhao almost ended Tang rule. The Tang reconquered the region in 866, causing half of the local rebels to flee into the mountains, marking the separation between the Mường and the Vietnamese.
According to Jennifer Holmgren, the first six centuries of Chinese rule saw more Vietnamization of local Chinese than Sinicization of local Vietnamese. Compared to the first six centuries of Chinese rule when demographics were relatively stable, Chinese migration during the Tang period was of sufficient magnitude to cause basic changes to certain portions of Vietnamese society in northern Vietnam. Most of these Chinese migrants came as soldiers or merchants, took a wife from the indigenous population, and settled down. They were individuals that settled down in a nuclear family, causing the average household size to decrease. Despite the increase of Chinese migrants to Vietnam, it was still much more constrained compared to Chinese migration to Guangdong and Guangxi due to the structure of Vietnamese society, which limited the ability of Chinese rulers to register and tax the local population. Vietnamese society retained their language and heritage. Other peoples like the Muong, Tay, and Nung people fled Chinese control into the uplands, where Chinese registers could not reach them. Non-Chinese foreign migration was also significant in the south due to pressures elsewhere such as the expanding Cham kingdom.
In 938, the Vietnamese leader Ngô Quyền who was a native of Thanh Hóa, led Vietnamese forces to defeat the Chinese armada at Bạch Đằng River. He proclaimed himself king over a polity that could be perceived as "Vietnamese".