Rade people

The Rade (also Ê Đê or Rhade) are an Austronesian ethnic group of southern Vietnam (population 270,348 in 1999).

Language

The Rade language is one of the Chamic languages, a subfamily of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. Other Cham languages are spoken in central Vietnam and in Aceh, Sumatra; The Cham are more distantly to related to the Malayic languages of Indonesia, Malaysia and Madagascar and to the Philippine languages.

The Cham developed a writing system developed on the basis of the Latin script in the 1920s.

Kinship and Social Structure

The Rade practice matrilineal descent. Descent is traced through the female line, and family property is in the hands of and inherited from women. The basic kinship unit is the matrilineage; these are grouped into higher-level matrilineal sibs (matrisibs). The Rade are further divided into two phratries.

The women of a matrilineage and their spouses and children live together in a longhouse. The lineage holds corporate property such as paddy land, cattle, gongs, and jars; these are held by the senior female of the matrilineage. The lineage also engages in the farming of common lands and maintenance of the longhouse. The head of the longhouse itself is a man, with the position most commonly inherited by the spouse of the daughter or sister-in-law of the previous longhouse head.

Ngái people

The Ngái (Vietnamese: Người Ngái) are a Hakka people in Vietnam and other nearby countries of mainland Southeast Asia. They were originally from China. The Ngái people speak Hakka Chinese but are classified separately from the Hoa or urban ethnic "Overseas Chinese" by Vietnamese government. According an official data, the Ngái population was 4841 in 1999 but down only 1035 in 2009.

See also

References