Nguyễn

Nguyễn (Northern pronunciation, southern is the most common Vietnamese family name.

By some estimates, approximately forty percent of Vietnamese people have this surname.

The prevalence of Nguyễn as a family name in Vietnam extends to outside the country where many Vietnamese people have emigrated. Nguyễn is the seventh most common family name in Australia (second only to Smith in the Melbourne phone books), and the fifty-fourth most common in France. In the United States, it is the fifty-seventh most common family name according to the 2000 Census, as well as the most common exclusively East Asian surname, a massive leap from its 229th-place ranking in 1990. It is ranked 124th in the U.S. Social Security Index. It is the fifty-sixth most common surname in Norway and the 85th most common name in the Czech Republic and tops the foreign name list of that country. Nguyễn is the Vietnamese transliteration of the Chinese surname (阮), which is often transliterated as Ruan in Mandarin, Yuen in Cantonese, or Nyoe in Wu Chinese.