[4] From an anthropologist viewpoint, both the Mường and the Vietnamese Kinh are descended from common origins-the ancient Viet-Muong speakers-the northern subbranch of the Vietic ethnolinguistic group of the Austroasiatic family that had heavily contact with Tai-speaking people and other Northern Austroasiatic speakers during the first millennia.

[5] The Mường are often perceived as an intact culture, compared to the sinicized Vietnamese (Kinh) in the lowland, and they also tend to adopt and exchange many customs of the neighboring Black Tai [6] Like other Zomia areas (highlands >300 meters) groups, for most of history, the Mường were neither under any regional pre-modern states' influence, both politically and culturally.

Professor James C. Scott in his 2009 book The Art of Not Being Governed also included the abstract outlined by Keith Taylor and Patricia Pelley that "the Mường are popularly regarded as the pre-Sinitic version of the Việt.

"[7] Although it has been little studied, scholarships believe that due to many plausible reasons, the ethnically and linguistically schism between Vietnamese and Mường speakers occurred during the seventh to ninth centuries AD, roughly during the period of Chinese Tang Empire's domination over Northern Vietnam.

[13] Presently, the Mường are one of the four main groups of Vietic speakers in Vietnam, the others being the Việt, Thổ and Chứt.

The Nguồn, who are classified as Việt, are sometimes believed to be the southernmost group of the Mường, who intermixed with Chứt people.

[4] In the Mường epic cycle the origins of all natural phenomena, the first people and then their cultural practices such as the acquisition of fire, building houses, producing silk, casting bronze drums, and weaving and embroidering, are related to the uplands.

Only one son of the first Mường parents, Dịt Dàng, or the king Việt, went down to lowlands to live and to build a capital city there with a palace and big market.

This place in the plains is named in the epic tales as Kinh Kỳ-Kẻ Chợ, i.e. the area of the capital city and market-place.

For instance, they jointly cut down the huge tree of Chu ‘with its copper trunk and iron branches’ and together move it out of the mountains down to the plains.

In contrast to this, in the Vietnamese story of descent the capital city is located in an upland area, in Phong Châu.

Here the eldest of the fifty sons who stayed in the mountains with their mother founded the capital of the first Vietnamese kingdom Văn Lang.

The Mường practice their traditional ethnic religion, worshiping ancestral spirits and other supernatural deities.