The 54 ethnic groups

Leave the big cities for a moment and take the road into the mountains of the North. As you climb toward Sa Pa or Hà Giang, the rice paddies rise in dizzying staircases, and in the markets appear clothes you have never seen: deep indigo embroidered with red and pink thread, silver headdresses that chime, pleated skirts with geometric patterns. These are not stage costumes: they are the everyday clothes of whole communities. You have just discovered that Vietnam is not a country of a single people, but a mosaic of 54 ethnic groups, each with its own language, festivals and memory.

54 dân tộc: a plural nation

The Vietnamese state officially recognizes 54 ethnic groups, called dân tộc ("zun tok"), a word that means both "people" and "ethnicity." This figure of 54 has become a national symbol: you find it in textbooks, museums, speeches. It says something important: to be Vietnamese does not mean belonging to one single people, but being part of a rich and diverse whole.

The largest of these groups, by very far, is the Kinh, also called Việt ("viet"). The Kinh make up the overwhelming majority of the population — on the order of 85%. It is their language, Vietnamese (tiếng Việt), that is the country's official language, and it is above all in the lowlands, the deltas and the cities that they live. When people abroad speak of "the Vietnamese," they most often think, without knowing it, of the Kinh.

But there remain 53 other groups, the ethnic minorities (dân tộc thiểu số, "zun tok thyoo saw"), roughly 15% of the population. Together they number millions of people, and hold an immense place in the country's geography and imagination.

Where the minorities live: mountains and highlands

The distribution is no accident. Historically, the Kinh settled the low, fertile, irrigated lands: the Red River delta in the North, the Mekong delta in the South, the coastal plains. The minorities, for their part, live mostly in the mountains and on the highlands, those high-altitude regions long more isolated.

Broadly speaking, two great homelands stand out:

• The mountains of the North and Northwest, around Sa Pa, Hà Giang, Lào Cai, Điện Biên, home notably to the Tày, the Thái, the H'Mông (Hmong), the Dao, the Nùng and many others.
• The Central Highlands, the Tây Nguyên, where you meet the Ê Đê, the Gia Rai, the Ba Na, the Xơ Đăng and their neighbors, with their longhouses and their gongs.

This geography explains much: the terraced fields cut into mountainsides, the high-perched village markets, the stilt houses adapted to slopes and damp.

One people, one language: linguistic diversity

What makes this diversity dizzying is that it is not only a matter of dress: it is also a diversity of languages. The 54 groups do not speak dialects of one and the same language, but languages belonging to several distinct major language families, sometimes as far apart from one another as French is from Chinese.

Without going into scholarly detail, one can note that Vietnam is home to languages from very different families, among which:

• The Austroasiatic family, to which Vietnamese itself belongs, along with the languages of many groups such as the Mường, very close to the Kinh, or the Khơ Me (Khmer) of the South.
• The Tai-Kadai family, with the languages of the Tày, Thái and Nùng.
• The Hmong-Mien family, with the H'Mông and the Dao.
• The Austronesian family, with highland groups like the Ê Đê and the Gia Rai, distant linguistic cousins of the peoples of the Pacific islands.
• The Sino-Tibetan family, with certain northern groups.

In other words, moving from valley to valley, in the mountainous North, can mean changing language entirely, sometimes writing system, and manner of greeting. This linguistic map makes Vietnam one of the most diverse countries in Southeast Asia.

Clothing, festivals and craftsmanship

Each dân tộc has its own traditional costumes (trang phục), and to a trained eye the color and patterns of a skirt or a headdress are often enough to recognize the group and sometimes the region. The H'Mông themselves break down into subgroups readily named by the dominant color of their clothes — Flower H'Mông, Black H'Mông, White H'Mông.

Embroidery, hemp weaving, dyeing with indigo (that plant which leaves the hands blue), basketry and silverwork are skills handed down from mother to daughter, generation to generation. Each motif can tell a story, a territory, a belief.

Festivals also give rhythm to these communities' lives. Many Central Highlands groups practice rituals around gongs — those sets of bronze gongs whose music accompanies great ceremonies, and which have indeed been recognized by UNESCO as cultural heritage. Elsewhere it is the festivals of the new rice, the love markets where the young meet, or the new years proper to each calendar.

A few faces of this plural Vietnam

Behind the abstract figure of 54 are peoples with singular histories, a few of which are worth knowing.

• The Chăm ("cham") are the heirs of the kingdom of Champa, a former Hindu and later Muslim empire that long dominated central Vietnam. It was they who built the red-brick towers still admired today, such as the sanctuary of Mỹ Sơn. Part of them are now Muslim, another part keep Hindu rites: a diversity within the diversity.
• The Khơ Me (Khmer) of the Mekong delta, close in language and religion to the neighboring Cambodians, punctuate the southern landscape with their Buddhist pagodas and their pointed golden roofs.
• The Hoa are the Vietnamese of Chinese origin, very present in trade and in the big cities, notably in the Chợ Lớn district of Ho Chi Minh City.
• The Mường, settled in the hills around the Hòa Bình region, are so close to the Kinh in language and culture that researchers see in them a precious witness to what the ancient Vietnamese world was.

This gallery, of course, tells only a fraction of the 54. But it recalls an obvious truth: Vietnamese diversity is not confined to the mountains of the North; it runs from the Mekong delta to the coastal plains, from Chăm mosques to Khmer pagodas.

Vietnam tells itself its own diversity

The country puts this plurality forward. In Hà Nội, the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology (Bảo tàng Dân tộc học) presents the clothes, houses and objects of the 54 groups, with full-scale houses rebuilt in its garden. The weekly highland markets, like those of Bắc Hà or Đồng Văn, are also living showcases: there, on a single morning, several groups from different valleys converge, each recognizable by its dress, to sell, buy, trade and reunite. These markets are not reconstructions for tourists: they are genuine economic and social gatherings, inherited from far back.

A living mosaic, between unity and diversity

To understand Vietnam is to hold both ends of a single rope. On one side, a strong unity: an official language, a state, a shared national history, and the ancient feeling of belonging to one same country. On the other, a deep diversity: 54 peoples, dozens of languages, an infinity of customs.

This diversity is not without challenges. The minority regions are among the most remote and hardest to reach, and the task of preserving languages, clothing and crafts while ensuring schooling, health and better living conditions is very real. Tourism, in Sa Pa especially, brings income but also raises the question of respect: a community is not a backdrop.

Above all, remember this: when you come across the figure 54, do not see a statistic, but a human patchwork. Behind each dân tộc there is a language being passed on, a hand that embroiders, a festival that gathers people. Vietnam is not a choir of a single voice: it is a polyphony of fifty-four voices that, together, form one same song.

Vietnamese to remember

• dân tộc (zun tok) — a people, an ethnicity, an ethnic group
• 54 dân tộc (nam moy tuh zun tok) — the 54 ethnic groups of Vietnam
• người Kinh (ngoy king) — the Kinh (Việt) people, the majority
• dân tộc thiểu số (zun tok thyoo saw) — the ethnic minorities
• tiếng Việt (tieng viet) — the Vietnamese language
• miền núi (mien nooy) — the mountain region
• Tây Nguyên (tay ngwen) — the Central Highlands
• trang phục (chang fook) — costume, traditional clothing
• thổ cẩm (thaw kum) — the traditional embroidered/woven cloth of the minorities
• cồng chiêng (kong chieng) — the bronze gongs, heritage of the highlands
• ruộng bậc thang (zuong buk thang) — terraced rice fields
• nhà sàn (nya san) — the stilt house
• chợ phiên (chuh fien) — the periodic highland market