During the course of your journey, you will notice the thousand faces of Viet Nam. Each region is singular, either because of its landscapes or its inhabitants. The 53 ethnic minorities are flowers composing a meadow in the spring.
Historically, the number of minorities comes from migrations of peoples from China, Burma, Laos or Thailand, starting from the Third Century before our era until the 19th Century. Today, those minorities appear as marginal, kept aside from the ‘’big Viet family’’, the 54th is the most numerous of the country, living in the Red River and Mekong delta, or in the coastal plains in the Middle part of the country.
Five groups are referenced by ethnologists:
The Môn-Khmer and Viêt-Muong,
The Tai-Kadai group,
The H’Mong and Daos,
The Sino-Tibetans and the Tibeto-Burmans
The malayo-polynesians,
All of them live in defined areas, either in the mountains of North Viet Nam, on the Highlands or in the South at the Cambodian border.
Those who we commonly call Vietnamese people, like myself, constitute the ‘’major ethnicity’’, representing over 80% of the population. We are the ‘’Kinh’’, a group resulting from a mingling of the native populations of Mon-Khmer and Thai of the Red River delta.
