Nobody knows exactly. The published figures disagree with one another by a factor of six, and the disagreement is itself part of the story. What is not in dispute is the direction of travel: there are far fewer of us than there were, in a homeland now holding many times the people it did, and we are a minority in every province of our own country.
The figures, and who gives them
| Figure | Source and date | What it counts |
|---|---|---|
| 3 to 3.5 million | Dega records of the French colonial period | The whole highland population before the wars |
| about 1 million | Gerald C. Hickey, Sons of the Mountains / Free in the Forest (1982) | The highland population as he found it, with over 200,000 dead in the war and 85 per cent of villages destroyed or abandoned |
| about 1 million, roughly a quarter of 4 million | Human Rights Watch, Repression of Montagnards (2002), p.13 | Indigenous highlanders as a share of the Central Highlands population at the time of the 2001 protests |
| 1.5 to 1.7 million | Vietnamese census returns, 2019, summing the recognised highland groups | Everyone the state counts under the relevant ethnic categories, wherever they live |
| around 500,000 | Dega community estimate | People who are Dega in the sense this library uses — in the highlands, identifying as such |
The 2019 census, group by group
These are the state's own figures. We reproduce them because they are the only systematic count that exists, not because we accept the categories they use.
| People | Vietnamese name | 2019 census | Chiefly in |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jarai | Gia Rai | 513,930 | Gia Lai, Kon Tum, Dak Lak |
| Rhade | Ê Đê | 398,671 | Dak Lak |
| Bahnar | Ba Na | 286,910 | Gia Lai, Kon Tum |
| Sedang | Xơ Đăng | — | Kon Tum |
| Koho | Cơ Ho | — | Lam Dong |
| Mnong | M'nông | — | Dak Nong, Dak Lak |
A further 26,922 Jarai were counted in Cambodia, where the Jarai are about 23 per cent of the population of Ratanakiri. Around 10,000 Bahnar live in the United States and some 5,000 in France. Where a cell reads — we have not yet verified the 2019 figure against the published census tables and will not print a number we cannot source.
Why no one can simply count
Three obstacles stand between anyone and an honest number.
The highlands were closed. For eighteen years after 1975 the Central Highlands were shut to almost all outside visitors, and the few admitted travelled escorted. The region reopened in the spring of 1993 — shortly before the eleventh session of the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations, a coincidence that was noticed at the time. Visitors who tested the new openness found signs in Vietnamese and English prohibiting entry to particular districts. Access has narrowed again since 2001, and closed almost entirely after 2004.
The counter is an interested party. A census conducted by the government accused of the harm cannot by itself settle the question of the harm. That is not an accusation of falsification; it is a statement about what evidence can and cannot do. Equally, an estimate made by a diaspora organisation from outside the country, however well informed, is an estimate.
The categories are not ours. Vietnam has recognised fifty-four ethnic groups since 2 March 1979. That list merges some communities that consider themselves distinct and separates others that do not, and it has no cell for "Dega". Adding the highland rows together produces a number for something, but not quite for the thing we are describing.
On the colonial-era figure
We hold that the 3 to 3.5 million of the colonial records is closer to the truth and that Hickey was counting a population already reduced by half a century of war, forced relocation and disease. Hickey's work remains the most careful outside study of our people that exists, and this library cites it throughout, including where we think his baseline is low. A reader should know that both numbers are on the record, know who produced each, and decide.
The other half of the arithmetic
A population share has a denominator, and ours changed faster than our numbers did.
In 1899, when the French created the autonomous administration at Darlac, there was effectively no settled Vietnamese population in our territories; the first arrived from 1918 as servants and staff of French officials. From 1956 the Republic of Vietnam under Ngo Dinh Diem established land development centres across the highlands and moved Vietnamese settlers into them, including refugees resettled from the north — Dega records put the total moved into the highlands under that programme at around 850,000, a figure we give as ours because we have not been able to match it to a published government series.
After 1975 the New Economic Zones programme moved people on a scale that dwarfed anything before it: over a million northerners went south and to the central regions between 1975 and 1980, and somewhere between 750,000 and more than a million southerners were displaced into what the planners called uninhabited mountainous forested areas. Human Rights Watch concluded that state resettlement schemes had quadrupled the population density of Vietnamese and other migrants in parts of the highlands since 1975. The coffee boom of the 1990s then drew spontaneous migration on top of the planned kind.
The result, as of the 2022 estimates, is a Central Highlands region of roughly 6.09 million people in 54,548 square kilometres. We are a fraction of that. Within a single lifetime we went from being the population of the Central Highlands to being a minority in it — which is precisely what the official word for us, ethnic minority, records without saying.
Terms
- Ethnic minority dân tộc thiểu số
- The state's classification of us. It describes the outcome of the resettlement programmes, not a fact about who the highlands belong to.
- New Economic Zones vùng kinh tế mới
- The post-1975 resettlement programme that moved lowland populations into the highlands and other frontier regions.
- Land development centres dinh điền
- The Diem-era equivalent, from 1956.
Sources
- Gerald C. Hickey, Sons of the Mountains and Free in the Forest (Yale University Press, 1982)
- Human Rights Watch, Repression of Montagnards: Conflicts over Land and Religion in Vietnam's Central Highlands (April 2002) — pp. 2, 13, 20, 25–26
- Vietnam General Statistics Office, Population and Housing Census 2019
- New Economic Zones programme — scale of the 1975–1980 movements
- Montagnard Foundation, Inc., historical summaries (archive held by DCHO) — the colonial-era and 850,000 figures
Compiled September 2026. The blank cells above are deliberate. If you have the published 2019 census tables for the Sedang, Koho and Mnong, send them and we will fill them in with the citation.