Tày people
ethnic group
The Tày people, also known as the Thổ, T'o, Tai Tho, Ngan, Phen, Thu Lao, or Pa Di, is a Central Tai-speaking ethnic group who live in northern Vietnam. According to a 2019 census, there are 1.8 million Tày people living in Vietnam. This makes them the second largest ethnic group in Vietnam after the majority Kinh (Vietnamese) ethnic group. Most live in northern Vietnam in the Cao Bằng, Lạng Sơn, Bắc Kạn, Thái Nguyên, and Quảng Ninh provinces, along the valleys and the lower slopes of the mountains. They also live in some regions of the Bắc Ninh and Bắc Giang provinces. They inhabit fertile plains and are generally agriculturalists, mainly cultivating rice. They also cultivate maize, and sweet potato among other things.
History
The Tày were once known as the Thổ people. Thổ is derived from Chinese tǔ (土), which means 'land' and 'local'. Although not inherently a pejorative it was often used as such in practice (cf.
“Tày people” enters the record as ethnic group. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what people, ethnic and group can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q72484. The Library of Congress control number is sh2015001467. 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 “Tày 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.