The Kinh — the majority people

Picture an earthen dike winding between shimmering rice paddies in the early morning, mist still clinging to the banyan trees, the smell of wood smoke and cooking rice, the distant slap of sandals on the packed earth of a village courtyard. In the middle of it all, a great curved roof rises above the low houses: the communal house, the beating heart of the community. Welcome to the world of the Kinh (say "king"), also called người Việt (nguh-oy vyet, "the Viet people") — the people who gave the country its name and whose language, culture and landscapes shape the very image the world holds of Vietnam.

Who are the Kinh?

The Kinh are by far the majority group in Vietnam: around 85% of the population, the vast majority of the country's inhabitants. Officially, Vietnam recognizes 54 ethnic groups (dân tộc, zun-top), and the Kinh are one of them — but a group so large and so central that people often, mistakenly, treat "Vietnamese" and "Kinh" as the same thing. The other 53 groups, the ethnic minorities (dân tộc thiểu số, zun-top thyew saw), live mostly in the mountains and highlands, while the Kinh occupy the most coveted ground: the lowland plains and deltas.

Their historical cradle is the Red River Delta (đồng bằng sông Hồng, dong-bang song hong) in the north, around present-day Hà Nội. From there, over the centuries, the Kinh spread southward in a long movement historians call the "march to the south" (Nam tiến, nam-tyen), gradually reaching the Mekong Delta (đồng bằng sông Cửu Long, "Delta of the Nine Dragons") in the far south. Today you find them in every major city — Hà Nội, Huế, Đà Nẵng, Sài Gòn / Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh — and all along the coast.

The word Kinh (京) originally means "the capital." It was used to distinguish the people of the plains and the central cities, around the capital, from the populations of the mountainous margins. This is a key to understanding Kinh identity: that of a lowland people, of water and rice paddies, oriented toward urban, literate culture as much as toward the village.

The rice civilization

You cannot understand the Kinh without understanding rice (lúa for the growing plant, gạo for the husked grain, cơm for cooked rice). Wet-rice farming is not merely an agriculture: it is an entire civilization, a way of organizing time, space and human relationships.

• The flooded paddy (ruộng, roo-ong) demands meticulous collective work: building and maintaining the dikes, regulating the water, transplanting the young seedlings by hand, bent over, feet in the warm mud.
• The calendar follows the monsoons and the harvests; two, sometimes three harvests a year set the rhythm of life.
• Water is everywhere in the language and the imagination. The word nước (nuh-oc) means both "water" and "country": đất nước (dut-nuh-oc), literally "land and water," means "homeland." To name your country is to name your earth and your water.

This dependence on water and shared labor forged an ethic of solidarity and mutual aid, but also of hierarchy and order: someone has to decide when to open the sluice gates. From this comes the central importance of the village community.

The village, the communal house and the ancestors

An old saying goes: Phép vua thua lệ làng (fep-vua thua le-lang), "the king's laws yield to the village's customs." The village (làng, lang) is the basic unit of traditional Kinh life, often ringed by a hedge of bamboo, turned in on itself, almost self-governing.

At the center of the village stands the đình (dinh), the communal house. It is a vast wooden building with a sweeping curved roof, at once:

• a temple dedicated to the village's tutelary spirit (thành hoàng, than-hwang), the guardian spirit of the place;
• a town hall and assembly place where the notables settled affairs;
• a festival hall for the great ceremonies and festivals (lễ hội, le-hoy).

Beside the đình you often find the Buddhist pagoda (chùa, choo-a) and small temples. For Kinh religious life is a subtle weave: Buddhism (Phật giáo), Confucianism (Nho giáo) and Taoism (Đạo giáo), the "three teachings" (tam giáo), blend into the most vibrant common layer of all, the cult of the ancestors.

In nearly every Kinh home, an ancestor altar (bàn thờ, ban-tuh) holds the place of honor: photographs of the departed, incense sticks, fruit, tea. The deceased grandparents and parents are "invited back" on the anniversaries of their death (ngày giỗ, ngay-zaw) and at every major festival. The idea is simple and profound: the dead do not vanish, they watch over us, and we must care for them as they once cared for us. This filial piety (hiếu, hyew) may be the single most central value in Kinh culture.

The Vietnamese language, the country's cement

The Kinh speak Vietnamese (tiếng Việt, tyeng-vyet), the country's official language and the mother tongue of the great majority of its people. It belongs to the Austroasiatic language family, and it is a tonal language: the same syllable changes meaning entirely depending on the melody with which you pronounce it. The famous example: ma can mean, depending on the tone, "ghost" (ma), "but" (mà), "cheek" (má), "grave" (mả), "horse" (mã) or "rice seedling" (mạ). Six tones, six words.

Another striking feature: Vietnamese today is written in the Latin alphabet, the chữ Quốc ngữ (chu-kwok-ngu, "script of the national language"), studded with accent marks (the dấu, zoh) that precisely notate the tones. This system was developed from the 17th century by missionaries, among them the Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes, and generalized much later. Before that, people wrote with characters of Chinese origin (chữ Hán) and an adapted vernacular script, chữ Nôm.

The language carries the people's history: centuries of exchange with China left a vast fund of Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary (từ Hán Việt), a bit like Latin in English. To understand a Vietnamese word is often to glimpse a whole layer of history.

Family and the art of address

One last trait, invisible but crucial: among the Kinh, people almost never use a plain, neutral "I" and "you." The language forces you to place everyone within a hierarchy of kinship, even between strangers. You address an older person as an elder or an uncle, a younger one as a junior, an old person as a grandparent.

• You call a slightly older man anh (ang, "big brother"), a slightly older woman chị (chee, "big sister").
• You call a younger person em (em, "little sibling").
• You call a grandfather ông (ohng) and a grandmother bà (ba), but also, politely, any elderly man or woman.
• To say "thank you," you often add this kinship term: cảm ơn anh (kam-uhn ang), "thank you, big brother."

To speak Vietnamese, then, is constantly to acknowledge the other's place within one great imaginary family. This piety of language extends, in every sentence, the respect for elders and the cult of the ancestors. It is here, perhaps more than in the temples or the paddies, that the heart of Kinh culture is curled.

A culture present everywhere

Because they are the majority and settled in the centers, the Kinh produced what is often regarded as the Vietnamese "national culture" — without this taking anything away from the distinct richness of the minorities.

• The food: phở (fuh), the beef or chicken noodle soup; bánh mì (bang-mee), the sandwich born from the encounter with the French baguette; nem / chả giò (fried rolls); the omnipresent fish sauce (nước mắm, nuh-oc mam), signature of the Vietnamese palate; the art of fresh herbs, of the balance between sour, salty, sweet and spicy.
• The festivals: above all Tết (tet), the Lunar New Year, when people return to their home village, clean the ancestor altar, hand children red envelopes (lì xì, lee-see) and eat the square sticky-rice cake, bánh chưng.
• The arts: poetry and proverbs (ca dao, tục ngữ), sung theater (chèo, tuồng, cải lương), and water puppetry (múa rối nước, moo-a roy nuh-oc), a unique art form born on the flooded paddies, where figurines dance on the surface of the water.
• The dress: the áo dài (ao-zai), the long split tunic worn over trousers, which has become the emblem of Vietnamese elegance.

A word of balance

To say the Kinh are the majority does not mean they are "the real Vietnam" and the others mere extras. Vietnam is a mosaic: the Tày, the H'Mông, the Chăm, the Khmer and dozens of other peoples have their own languages, dress, gods and genius. But because the Kinh language is the official language, because their rice feeds the cities, because their history became the national narrative, to understand the Kinh is to hold the main thread from which you can then explore, with respect and curiosity, all the others.

Vietnamese to remember

• người Việt (nguh-oy vyet) — the Kinh, literally "the Viet people"
• dân tộc (zun-top) — ethnic group, people
• tiếng Việt (tyeng-vyet) — the Vietnamese language
• làng (lang) — the traditional village
• đình (dinh) — the communal house, heart of the village
• lúa (loo-a) — growing rice; cơm (kuhm) — cooked rice
• nước (nuh-oc) — water, and also "country"
• đất nước (dut-nuh-oc) — homeland, lit. "land and water"
• bàn thờ (ban-tuh) — the ancestor altar
• hiếu (hyew) — filial piety, respect for parents and elders
• Tết (tet) — the Lunar New Year, the greatest festival
• áo dài (ao-zai) — the traditional long tunic