Nguyễn

If you spend any time in Vietnam you are bound to meet at least one person named Nguyễn. Nguyễn is not just the most common family name in Vietnam, it is a symbol of the nation. It is a name which was even borne by Ho Chi Minh in his early life, before he adopted his revolutionary alias. The world over, when people hear the name Nguyễn, they immediately think of Vietnam.

Thanks to the exodus of Vietnamese overseas starting in the 1970s, Nguyễn has become the 7th most common family name in Australia. Flip through a phonebook in the Australian city of Melbourne, and you will see that Nguyễns are outnumbered only by the Smith’s. In the USA live more than 130,000 Nguyễns, among them Dustin Nguyễn who starred with Johnny Depp in the 1980s TV series 21 Jump Street. One American Nguyễn remarked on his website, “If you’re from California, Texas, Missouri, or Massachusetts, the ‘Nguyễn’ section probably took up at least two pages of your High School yearbook.” In Vietnam itself, 38.4 per cent of people bear the family name Nguyễn. The nearest rival, Trần, accounts to only 11 per cent.

The History of a Name

So, there are a lot of Nguyễns in the world, tens of millions of them to be precise. Like the Smiths and O’Sullivans before them, the Nguyễns have become a global race. They are a tribe united by a single Chinese character, a six-stroke ideogram which is pronounced “Nguyễn” in Vietnamese, “Ruan” in Mandarin Chinese, and “Yuen” in Cantonese. Chinese ideograms aren’t usually used in Vietnam these days, which is a shame because a picture often tells a thousand words. The character for Nguyễn, for example, comprises two parts, one of which means “hill” and the other “origin”. Read together Nguyễn/Ruan/Yuen means “hill-origin”, or more simply “origin”.

In China, the name Ruan appeared nearly 2000 years ago, and became the name of the guitar or lute-like plucked string instrument which has been played in Chinese operas for countless centuries. The instrument was supposedly named after Ruan Xin, a 3rd century poet and musician and a member of the rebel mystics known as the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove. To this day, there are Ruans living in China, although not as many as there used to be.

The Construction of Vietnamese Names

The construction and arrangement of Vietnamese names is probably unique in the world. There are usually three names in all, and as in other East Asian countries, the first name is the family (or clan) name. While English family names were often derived by a person’s occupation (smith, baker, cook) or their appearance (long, short, white, black), ancient Vietnamese got their name from the clan they belonged to. Hence, it would be possible for all the inhabitants of a city or region to give themselves the same family name. This helps to explain why Nguyễns are so common in Vietnam today.

While the last name is similar to the Christian name of Western societies, the Vietnamese middle name often denotes a person’s sex and position in the family (for example, if they are a first-born male). In some families all the children have the same middle name, while in others middle names are passed on by fathers to their sons, and mothers to their daughters. Some Vietnamese claim that their middle names are actually their family name, while their first name is their king’s name (see this forum for an insight!) Since there have been plenty of Nguyễn kings in Vietnam’s history, this might explain why so many of their subjects got the same name.

The Origin of the Name Which Means “Origin”

There are many stories explaining why Nguyễn became such a common name in Vietnam. Many Vietnamese Nguyễns claims to be descended from kings, or at least the subjects of kings. Some of them insist their ancestors were subjects of Ruan Cho, the governor of northern Vietnam in the Chinese Chen Dynasty (557-589AD). Another story is that the emperor of the last Vietnamese dynasty, the Nguyễn Dynasty, wanted to be remembered so he forced all his subjects to adopt his name.

How Do You Pronounce Nguyễn?

For such a common name worldwide, few foreigners are able to pronounce Nguyễn correctly. For one thing, the name should be pronounced as a single syllable. It sounds something like “Gwin”, but this is only an approximation. For a more realistic effect, try saying “Noo-When” as fast as you can. But since Vietnamese is a tonal language, you have to sing the name rather than just say it.