Vietnamese surnames are the surnames held by people in the country of Vietnam today, as well as the extensive Vietnamese diaspora in countries like the United States, Australia, Cambodia, Japan and France. Vietnamese surname conventions are something of a by-product of the country’s long associations with China, often with an emphasis on patrilineal line of descent through reference to a male ancestor, though matronymics are also found. An ancestor’s physical attributes are often the basis of surnames. The range of Vietnamese surnames is much more limited than is the case with European ethnic traditions. For instance, just over a thousand Vietnamese surnames are known of and from these a few dozen make up well over 90% of all Vietnamese people, with Nguyen (rendered Nguyễn with diacritics) in particular accounting for nearly 40% of all Vietnamese people.
History of Vietnamese surnames
The concept of surnames was broadly introduced into Vietnam, or what until modern times was primarily known as Dai Viet or Annam, by the Chinese. The history of the two nations are intertwined, with Vietnam being regularly invaded and taken control of by various Chinese dynasties from the third century BCE onwards. Yet the Viet also managed to expel the Chinese on many occasions and Indochina became a region of great wealth and power itself in the period roughly between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. It was during one of the periods of Chinese influence between the seventh and tenth centuries that Chinese concepts of surnames were first introduced. They are generally derived from Middle Chinese. The concept of adopting surnames gained greater momentum in more recent centuries.[1]
Vietnamese naming conventions
Vietnamese surnames follow many of the same conventions one will find elsewhere in the world. Many are patronymics which indicate a line of descent from a revered ancestor. Others are occupational and describe the work a forbear engaged in, such as working in the rice paddy fields, while others still are toponymic and describe the physical characteristics of a place someone came from. The range is much more limited though than in other countries, with just a few dozen surnames accounting for the vast majority of the Vietnamese population. Vietnamese surnames appear at the start of names. Thus, to take a prominent example, Ho Chi Minh, whose real name was Nguyen Sinh Cung, had the surname Nguyen, the most common of all Vietnamese surnames. It appears at the start of his name and his given personal names were then Sinh Cung, with the middle name coming second and the personal name coming last. Therefore the arrangement is the direct inverse of that in most western, European traditions.[2]
The peculiar case of the Nguyen (Nguyễn) surname is worth noting. The reasons for the dominance of Nguyen as a surname are broadly historical. The word itself is of Chinese origin and refers originally to a musical instrument, a kind of four-stringed lute. It subsequently became enormously common owing to the power of the Nguyen Dynasty in the politics of Dai Viet/Vietnam. This family emerged to become a powerful feudal lordly family in the sixteenth century, one which dominated large tracts of the country in the seventeenth and eighteenth century before becoming the royal dynasty in 1802. They even remained the formal emperors of parts of Vietnam under French colonial rule.[3] As all of this occurred, many people adopted the Nguyen surname and nearly two in five Vietnamese people carry this surname today. Because of its widespread use as a Vietnamese surname, this particular surname is even amongst the top 40 surnames in the whole of the United States, making it one of the very few surnames inside the top 100 American surnames that is not English, Welsh, Scottish or Irish in origin.[4]
Most popular Vietnamese surnames
The most popular Vietnamese surnames are as follows:
- Nguyen – Easily the most common Vietnamese surname, accounting for between 35% and 39% of the population of Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora.
- Tran – The second most common Vietnamese surname, one that is borne by approximately one in eight Vietnamese people today. It means ‘to display’, in the sense of having a bare foot and emerged as a way of describing somebody who lived and worked near water, most likely in the rice paddy fields.
- Le – Over 9% of Vietnamese people have this surname. It is of Chinese derivation, being a Vietnamese rendering of Li, the name of an ethnic group from Hainan, the Chinese island that lies across the Gulf of Tonkin from northern Vietnam.
- Pham – Derived from the Chinese ‘Fan’, transliterating as ‘to display’.
- Hoang – Derived from the Chinese ‘Huang’, meaning yellow, this is a descriptive surname which may indicate an ancestor had particularly fair hair, though it could have multiple meanings, indicating an association with the Yellow River in China or with gold-smithing or mining.
Between them these five surnames account for the surnames of over 70% of all Vietnamese people.[5]
Famous Vietnamese people
- Tran Hung Dao – A thirteenth-century Vietnamese military commander who staved off a Mongolian invasion of Vietnam on two occasions by the armies of Kublai Khan.[6]
- Ho Chi Minh – The leader of the Vietnamese communist movement and the wars against both France and the United States in the post-Second World War era was actually born Nguyen Sinh Cung. He subsequently changed his name around 1940 to Ho Chi Minh, meaning ‘He who enlightens’.[7]
- Nguyen Thi Binh – The lead delegate to the Paris Conference which negotiated a possible end to the Vietnam War between 1968 and 1973. She subsequently became Minister of Education in post-war Vietnam and its first female Vice-President in 1992.[8]
- ‘Scotty’ Nguyen – A Vietnamese-American poker player who has won five World Series of Poker bracelets, including the 1998 World Series of Poker main event, the most important poker event in the whole world.[9]
References
- ↑ M. Coughlin, ‘Vietnam: In China’s Shadow’, in Journal of Southeast Asian History, Vol. 8, No. 2 (September, 1967), pp. 240–249.
- ↑ https://culturalatlas.sbs.com.au/vietnamese-culture/vietnamese-culture-naming
- ↑ Bruce Lockhart, ‘Reassessing the Nguyen Dynasty’, in Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2001), pp. 9–53.
- ↑ Dan Nosowitz, ‘Why 40% of Vietnamese People Have the Same Last Name’, Atlas Obscura, 28 March 2017.
- ↑ https://vinpearl.com/en/vietnamese-last-names-amaze-with-6-interesting-facts
- ↑ Shawn McHale, ‘“Texts and Bodies”: Refashioning the Disturbing Past of Tran Vietnam (1225–1400)’, in Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 42, No. 4 (1999), pp. 494–518.
- ↑ https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ho-Chi-Minh
- ↑ https://exotictravelvietnam.com/vietnamese-women/
- ↑ https://www.wsop.com/players/profile/?playerid=266