Đắk Lắk (or Daklak;, formerly Darlac) is a province of Vietnam. It is located in Vietnam's Central Highlands, and is home to quite a few indigenous ethnic minorities, such as the Rade, the Jarai and the Mnong, among others.
The name comes from the Mnong (a Mon-Khmer language) word dak Lak (which would sound rather like "Đác Lác" in Vietnamese), literally "Lak Lake", the largest freshwater lake in the province. The word dak means "water" or "lake", and is a cognate of the Vietnamese nước/nác ("water"). The official spelling in Vietnamese is Đắk Lắk, despite the fact that the original Mnong word contains long "a" sounds rather than short "ă" sounds. Some other spellings such as Dak Lak, Daklak, Đăk Lăk, Đắc Lắc, and Darlac (in older French texts), among others, have also been used. The Daklak Guest House, for example, inconsistently uses Daklak and Đắk Lắk. Linguist Nguyễn Minh Hoạt has argued that a sensible spelling would be Dak Lăk, based on the ground that lak means dermatophytosis in Rade (an unrelated language of the Austronesian family), while at the same time citing the Mnong origin as the basis for the dak part of the spelling. The derivative Đắk Nông province appears to have been named after this province, by replacing Lắk with Nông for "Mnong".
