Historic and modern chữ Nôm scripture classically uses the Han character '京', pronounced "Jīng" in Mandarin, and "Kinh" with Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation.

[78] According to Victor Lieberman, người Kinh (Chữ Nôm: 𠊛京) may be a colonial-era term for Vietnamese speakers inserted anachronistically into translations of pre-colonial documents, but literature on 18th century ethnic formation is lacking.

[83] They also show affinities with Núi Nấp populations from Bronze Age Vietnam,[84] which can be modeled as a mixture of Dushan-related (∼65%) and northern East Asian-related (∼35%) ancestry.

[85] One hypothesis suggests that the forerunners of the ethnic Kinh descend from a subset of proto-Austroasiatic people in southern China, either around Yunnan, Lingnan, or the Yangtze River, as well as mainland Southeast Asia.

The Munda of northeastern India were another subset of proto-Austroasiatics who likely diverged earlier than the aforementioned groups, given the linguistic distance in basic vocabulary of the languages.

Most archaeologists, linguists, and other specialists, such as Sinologists and crop experts, believe that they arrived no later than 2000 BC, bringing with them the practice of riverine agriculture and in particular, the cultivation of wet rice.

[86][87][88][89] Some linguists (James Chamberlain, Joachim Schliesinger) have suggested that Vietic-speaking people migrated from the North Central Region of Vietnam to the Red River Delta, which had originally been inhabited by Tai speakers.

have proposed that tribes in northern Vietnam and southern China did not have any kind of defined ethnic boundary and could not be described as "Vietnamese" (Kinh) in any satisfactory sense.

[105] According to a late-third- or early-fourth-century AD Chinese chronicle, Thục Phán, the leader of the Âu Việt, conquered Văn Lang and deposed the last Hùng king.

[103] In 179 BC, Zhao Tuo, a Chinese general who has established the Nanyue state in modern-day southern China, annexed Âu Lạc, which initiated Sino-Vietic interaction that lasted for a millennium.

[109][111] In 938, the Vietnamese leader Ngô Quyền who was a native of Thanh Hóa, led Viet forces to defeat the Chinese armada at Bạch Đằng River.

[114] With assistance of powerful Buddhist monks, Đinh Bộ Lĩnh chose Hoa Lư in the southern edge of the Red River Delta as the capital instead of Tang-era Đại La, adopted Chinese-style imperial titles, coinage, and ceremonies and tried to preserve the Chinese administrative framework.

"[119] The early 11th-century Cham inscription of Chiên Đàn, My Son, erected by king of Champa Harivarman IV (r. 1074–1080), mentions that he had offered Khmer (Kmīra/Kmir) and Viet (Yvan) prisoners as slaves to various local gods and temples of the citadel of Tralauṅ Svon.

Emperor Lý Thái Tổ (r. 1009–1028) relocated the Vietnamese capital from Hoa Lư to Đại La, the center of the Red River Delta in 1010.

His reign is recognized for the extensive administrative, military, education, and fiscal reforms he instituted, and a cultural revolution that replaced the old traditional aristocracy with a generation of literati scholars, adopted Confucianism, and transformed a Đại Việt from a Southeast Asian style polity to a bureaucratic state that flourished.

Thánh Tông's forces, armed with gunpowder weapons, overwhelmed the long-term rival Champa in 1471, then launched an unsuccessful invasion against the Laotian and Lan Na kingdoms in the 1480s.

In the northern Vietnamese polity of Đàng Ngoài (outer realm), the Lê emperors barely sat on the throne while the Trịnh lords held power of the court.

[132] Conflict among Vietnamese ended in 1802 as Emperor Gia Long, who was aided by French mercenaries, defeated the Tay Son kingdoms and reunited Vietnam.

By 1847, the Vietnamese state under Emperor Thiệu Trị, a people that were identified as "người Việt Nam" accounted for nearly 80 percent of the country's population.

Following the colonial government's efforts of ethnic classification, nationalism, especially ethnonationalism and eugenic social Darwinism, were encouraged among the new Vietnamese intelligentsia's discourse.

The mid-20th century marked a pivotal turning point with the Vietnam War, a conflict that not only left an indelible impact on the nation but also had far-reaching consequences for the Vietnamese people.

[83][144][145][146][143] Kinh Vietnamese also show affinities with Núi Nấp populations in Bronze Age Vietnam,[147] which modeled as a mixture of Dushan-related (∼65%) and northern East Asian-related (∼35%) ancestry.

[148] A 2017 study stated that the Kinh received significant genetic input from southern Han Chinese and to a lesser extent, Malays and Thais.

[152] Vietnamese folk religion is not an organized religious system, but a set of local worship traditions devoted to the "thần", a term which can be translated as "spirits", "Gods" or with the more exhaustive locution "generative powers".

Originally from northern Vietnam and southern China, the Vietnamese have expanded south and conquered much of the land belonging to the former Champa Kingdom and Khmer Empire over the centuries.

Recognizing an international humanitarian crisis, many countries accepted Vietnamese refugees, primarily the United States, France, Australia and Canada.