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. Phạm

    4. Huỳnh


    5. Phan

    6. Trương

    7. Hoàng

    8. Ngô

    9. Đặng

    10. Đỗ

    11. Bùi



    12. Dương

    13. Lương

    14. Đinh

    15. Trịnh

    16. Lưu

    17. Đoàn

    18. Đào

    19. Thái

    20. Mai

    21. Văn

    22. Cao

    23. Vương

    24. Phùng

    25. Quách

    26. Tạ

    27. Diệp

    28. Tôn

    29. La

    30. Thạch

    31. Thi

    32. Thanh

    33. Đàm

    34. Vong

    35. Triệu

    36. Bưu

    37. Phú

    38. Vĩnh

    39. Quang

    40. Tiều

    41. Hòa

    42. Trang

    43. Giang

    44. Lục

    45. Bành

    46. 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.

    13 comments:

    Anonymous said...

    What about the surname Ninh?

    xanghe said...

    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?? :)

    Anonymous said...

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

    xanghe said...

    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!

    Anonymous said...

    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.

    Brown Bear said...

    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.

    Tony Hoàng Long said...

    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!

    xanghe said...

    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.

    Unknown said...

    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.

    xanghe said...

    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.

    Doppelgänger said...

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

    xanghe said...

    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 :)

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