Why is nguyen a popular last name

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Monday, 29 June Comments No comments made yet. The Vietnamese last name Nguyen may be on track to become the most popular in Australia in the next decade, researchers estimate, outpacing current winners Smith and Jones. The Vietnamese surname is currently the 13th most popular in Australia but is gaining ground fast, wrote the News Limited Network. The name is the second most popular in Melbourne and the third most popular in Sydney, the island nation's most populous centers.

Alternate spellings include Nyguyen, Ruan, Yuen, and Yuan. Nguyen stems from the Chinese word ruan a string instrument that is plucked. In Vietnam , the family name Nguyen is connected to the royal dynasties. It is said that during the Tran Dynasty — , many members of the Ly family of the prior dynasty changed their name to Nguyen to avoid persecution. The Nguyen family had a place of prominence as early as the 16th century, but they would rule during the last of the dynasties.

By some estimates, approximately 40 percent of Vietnamese people have the surname Nguyen. It is, without a doubt, the most common Vietnamese family name. Nguyen can be used as a first name as well as a surname. Also, keep in mind that in Vietnamese it is traditional for the surname to be used before an individual's given name.

Nguyen is the seventh most common family name in Australia, the 54th most popular in France, and the 57th most popular surname in America. These statistics may be surprising until you recall the relationship each country has had with Vietnam.

For instance, France had colonized Vietnam as early as and fought the First Indochina War from until After taking over the country from Ly Dynasty, Tran Thu Do, who was in charge to run the country on behalf of the teenage king Tran Canh, made a decision that tremendously impacted the whole community of people who had Ly as their last names.

He required all of the members of the Ly royal family, who lived hidden to change their last name to Nguyen.

The purpose behind this was to remove Ly as the last name so nobody would know about its existence. But the question of why Tran Thu Do chose Nguyen as the last name to replace Ly with is still unanswerable, maybe it was just a random choice.

Then to further this decree, the Tran royals commanded that all citizens with Ly as their last name would have to change it to Nguyen. Surprisingly, this event of changing last names actually has been around since ancient times. Whenever the country was taken over by a new empire, it was an unwritten rule that all the people that had the family name of the previous royal family must change theirs to Nguyen.

History repeated itself when the Ho family defeated Tran Monarchy and took over the country.