who interact with, referred to the Vietnamese back then, and until modern-day, for instance, the Cham have been calling the Vietnamese as Yuen (yvan) from the reign of Harivarman IV (1074–1080) to present unchanged. It is evident that Vietnamese elites tried to tie their ethnic identity to the ancient Yue through constructed traditions during the late medieval period. However, all endonyms and exonyms referring to the Vietnamese such as Viet, Kinh, or Kra–Dai Keeu, are related to political structures or have common origins in ancient Chinese geographical imagination. Most of the time, the Austroasiatic-speaking ancestors of the modern Kinh under one single ruler might have assumed for themselves a similar or identical self-designation inherent in the modern Vietnamese first-person pronoun ta (us, we, I) to differentiate themselves from other groups. In the older colloquial usage, ta corresponded to "ours" as opposed to "theirs", and during colonial times they were "nước ta" (our country) and "tiếng ta" (our language) in contrast to "nước tây" (western countries) and "tiếng tây" (western languages). Historically Đại Việt, (Đại) Cồ Việt, or Cự Việt was the polity's official name and not a dynastic name. "Đại Việt Quốc" (the Great Viet state) was first mentioned in several brick inscriptions from Hoa Lu, the first capital of the polity, from the 10th century AD. According to Momoki (2014), the name (Đại) Cồ Việt is from the 15th-century chronicle Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư and likely originated from Cự Việt in 12th-century Ly dynasty inscriptions, rather than being the name for the kingdom during the late 10th century. History Origins For a thousand years, the area of what is now Northern Vietnam was ruled by a succession of Chinese dynasties as Nanyue, Giao Chỉ (, Jiaozhi), Giao Châu (, Jiaozhou), Annan, and Jinghai Circuit. Ancient Northern Vietnam and particularly the Red River Delta were inhabited by various different ethnolinguistic groups that constituted modern-day Hmong–Mien, Tibeto–Burman, Kra–Dai, Austroasiatic speaking peoples. Early societies had emerged and existed there for a while before the Han conquest in 111 BC, such as the Phùng Nguyên and Dong Son cultures. Both practiced metallurgy and sophisticated bronze-casting techniques. They were together called the Yue and barbarians by the Chinese and collectively understood as non-Chinese. Ancient Chinese texts do not give any distinction for each tribe, and not precisely indicate which languages of tribes that they interacted with in Northern Vietnam. All peoples living