The Ðông Sơn Speech Community: Evidence for Vietic

Abstract

This article reviews multiple lines of data in an attempt to determine the ethnolinguistic situation of the Red River Delta in northern Vietnam in the Ðông Sơn period (c. 600 BCE–200 CE) prior to the establishment of a Chinese administration there circa 200 BCE. A variety of possible scenarios are considered in light of linguistic, ethnological, archaeological, archaeogenetic, and historical textual data. Some scenarios must be excluded as they lack supporting evidence, while the remaining few are weighed against each other and ranked. At this point, the scenario with the most support, consisting primarily of archaeological and historical linguistic data, is that a community of Austroasiatic speakers resided in the Red River Delta from about 4000 BP, but that by the time of the arrival of Chinese groups, Vietic (a later stage of the original Austroasiatic group there) and early Tai groups had a presence in that region. Furthermore, comparative linguistic evidence most strongly supports a dominant Vietic linguistic presence in that region at that time, the portion of Vietic that eventually split off to become the Việt-Mường sub-branch and finally, within that, Vietnamese.