Muong people
ethnic group in Northern Vietnam
The Mường (Mường: mõl Mường; Vietnamese: người Mường) are an ethnic group native to northern Vietnam. The Mường is the country's third largest of 53 minority groups, with an estimated population of 1.45 million (according to the 2019 census). The Mường people inhabit a mountainous region of northern Vietnam centered in Hòa Bình Province and some districts of Phú Thọ province and Thanh Hóa Province. They speak the Mường language which is related to the Vietnamese language and the Thổ language and share ancient ethnic roots with the Vietnamese (Kinh) people.
Etymology
The word Mường in Vietnamese is etymologically related to the word mueang from the Tai languages, meaning "cultivated land" or "community", and referred to pre-modern semi-independent city-states or principalities in mainland Southeast Asia. This comes from their close association with the Tai peoples. The Mường call the Tai as ɲew, Nyo or Âu; while referring to themselves by various names, such as "Monglong", which means "people living in the center", to distinguish themselves from the people of the valleys and of the highlands. In Hòa Bình, They call themselves Mõl or Moăn. In Thanh Hóa, they call themselves Mon or Mwanl and in Phú Thọ Province, they call themselves Mon or Monl. Sometimes written as Mal, Mwal or Mwai.
“Muong people” enters the record as ethnic group in Northern Vietnam. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Muong, people and ethnic can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q72805. The Library of Congress control number is sh85088516. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “Muong people” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.