11/13/09

Top 50 Common Vietnamese Surnames

UPDATE 2018-09-22: Links to my Master's thesis (the "project" mentioned below) are here:

  • Spatial Little Saigon: Mapping an ethnic community, Hamatake, Ben, M.A., CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON, 2014, 72 pages
  • Spatial Little Saigon: Mapping an ethnic community, Map Appendices

    • I'm doing some research for a project at school and ran into this tidbit. Thought I'd share:


    1. Nguyễn

    2. Trần

    3. Lê

    4. Phạm

    5. Huỳnh

    6. Vũ

    7. Phan

    8. Trương

    9. Hoàng

    10. Ngô

    11. Đặng

    12. Đỗ

    13. Bùi

    14. Võ

    15. Lý

    16. Dương

    17. Lương

    18. Đinh

    19. Trịnh

    20. Lưu

    21. Đoàn

    22. Đào

    23. Thái

    24. Mai

    25. Văn

    26. Cao

    27. Vương

    28. Phùng

    29. Quách

    30. Tạ

    31. Diệp

    32. Tôn

    33. La

    34. Thạch

    35. Thi

    36. Thanh

    37. Đàm

    38. Vong

    39. Triệu

    40. Bưu

    41. Phú

    42. Vĩnh

    43. Quang

    44. Tiều

    45. Hòa

    46. Trang

    47. Giang

    48. Lục

    49. Bành

    50. Nghiêm

    Wikipedia has a nice post on Vietnamese surnames, but they're not all in order. I added the tones so they might be off. Let me know if I muffed your last name! I'll fix it.
    This list is used by the US Department of Justice and is based on several sources:
    Abrahamse A. F., Morrison, P. A. & Bolton, N. M. (1994). Population Research and Policy Review: 13 383-398.
    Barringer, H. R., Gardner, R. W. & Levin, M.J. (1993). Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States. The Population of the United States in the 1980s.
    Buechley, R. W. (1976). Generally useful ethnic search system: GUESS. University of New Mexico, Cancer Research and Treatment Cetner (mimeo).
    Choi, B. C. K., Hanley, A. J., Holowaty, E. J. & Dale, D. (1993). American Journal of Epidemiology 138: 723-734
    Kuo, J. & Porter, K. (1998). Health status of Asian Americans: United States, 1992-1994.
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    13 comments:

    1. AnonymousJuly 13, 2010 at 7:39 PM

      What about the surname Ninh?

      ReplyDelete
    2. xangheJuly 14, 2010 at 8:33 AM

      Good question. This list only gives the top 50 common surnames, based on several sources (see original post for citations). There was a book published by a Ninh, but I don't see much else in a quick web search. Even ancestry.com doesn't pull up a surname query for Ninh (maybe you should post one?? :)

      ReplyDelete
    3. AnonymousDecember 28, 2010 at 6:34 PM

      Can you find out where the surname Kim ranks in Vietnamese surname? I know there are not many Vietnamese with the last name Kim.

      ReplyDelete
    4. xangheJanuary 7, 2011 at 7:21 AM

      I'm actually not sure about Kim. The above list was compiled by the US Dept of Justice, but their references may have more information about the surname Kim.

      Let us know if you find something!

      ReplyDelete
    5. AnonymousNovember 10, 2015 at 10:05 PM

      Anyone know where I can find a list of Vietnamese family names with their meanings and possibly origins? I've looked and found nothing satisfactory yet.

      ReplyDelete
    6. Brown BearFebruary 1, 2017 at 4:17 PM

      I used to work in a Federal Detention Center and later a Federal Correctional Institution. For a while, it seemed like there was only three or four Vietnamese names. Mostly Tran, Nguyen, Hyunh, and Le. I am not saying this to be mean, but those were the most common. A lot like Smith, Jones, Brown, and Johnson I guess or in Spanish Gonzalez, Rodriguez, etc.

      ReplyDelete
    7. Tony Hoàng LongDecember 14, 2017 at 11:54 PM

      I think the second last surname (49th) was actually Bành, not Banh since I'm Vietnamese. But other than that, everything else was awesome. Keep up doing the great work there!

      ReplyDelete
      Replies
      1. xangheDecember 15, 2017 at 3:49 PM

        Hi Tony, thanks for pointing that out. I made the change. It's good to see that this post is still useful eight years later.

        Delete
    8. UnknownDecember 30, 2017 at 10:35 PM

      Great, xanghe! Just another thing to point out is that somehow Wikipedia has updated, adding the surname of "Hồ" into the list of "14 most common Vietnamese family names". So yeah, good NOT to see you abandon the post, even after 8 years it was published.

      ReplyDelete
    9. xangheJanuary 1, 2018 at 3:10 AM

      Yes, it does look like Wikipedia has really updated that page! That article is referring to family name distribution in Vietnam, whereas this list was compiled based on the Vietnamese American community. So that's probably the difference.

      ReplyDelete
    10. DoppelgängerSeptember 23, 2018 at 12:53 PM

      Anywhere I can go to find how many vietnamese are in a specific city? Cảm ơn

      ReplyDelete
      Replies
      1. xangheSeptember 23, 2018 at 9:09 PM

        Hi earth-two, that's actually are hard question because there are so many different criteria. This link gives a sample of cities throughout the US:
        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_large_Vietnamese-American_populations

        I actually updated this post with my thesis which discusses the methods of finding ethnic populations, and details a unique way of using voter records and GIS to visualize Vietnamese American distribution in Orange County. Hope that helps :)

        Delete
    11. erection pills online viagraNovember 25, 2020 at 9:06 PM

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      ReplyDelete