Rade people

The Rhade or Êđê (Rade language: Ānāk Dāgār / Degar people) are an indigenous Austronesian ethnic group of southern Vietnam (population 398,671 in 2019). The term Rhade is an old French inscription of Dāgār in the Rade language. The Rhade are also referred to as Ānāk Dāgār (Degar people). Ānāk Dāgār comes from the term Ānāk Kudāyā-Nāgār, meaning "Kudayanagar ethnic groups" or "the descendants of bok Kauṇḍinya and bia Nagar". The name "Kauṇḍinya" was derived from the name of Kampuchea, and "Nagar" refers to the primary goddess of the Cham people. As an ethnic group of the Vietnamese Central Highlands, the Rhade people's culture was influenced by both Champa and Cambodia. Because of their status occupying the border region between these two influences, the term Degar is also sometimes used to refer to the peoples of the Vietnamese Central Highlands as a collective group. According to French scholars of Southeast Asian studies, the character of Monk Kauṇḍinya symbolized the Indian cultural sphere which influenced classical Southeast Asia through Po Nagar (Champa), Neang Neak (Kampuchea), Nang Khosop (Laos), and Mae Khwan-khao (Thailand). This legend was popular with the ethnic groups of the Vietnamese Central Highlands and other ethnic groups of Southeast Asia within the Indian cultural sphere. 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 related to the Malayic languages of Indonesia, Malaysia and Madagascar, and to the Philippine languages. The Cham developed a writing system based on Latin script in the 1920s. The Rade practice matrilineal descent. Descent is traced through the female line, and family property is held and inherited by women. The basic kinship unit is the matrilineage, and these basic kinship units are grouped into higher-level matrilineal sibs (matrisibs). The Rade are further divided into two phratries.