The Ingaevones or, as Pliny has it, apparently more accurately, Ingvaeones ("people of Yngvi"), as described in Tacitus's Germania, written c. 98 AD, were a West Germanic cultural group living along the North Sea coast in the areas of Jutland, Holstein, Frisia and the Danish islands, where they had by the 1st century BCE become further differentiated to a foreigner's eye into the Frisii, Saxons, Jutes and Angles. The postulated common group of closely related dialects of the Ingvaeones is called Ingvaeonic or North Sea Germanic.

Tacitus' source categorized the Ingaevones near the ocean as one of the three tribal groups descended from the three sons of Mannus, son of Tuisto, progenitor of all the Germanic peoples, the other two being the Irminones and the Istaevones. According to Rafael von Uslar, this threefold subdivision of the West Germanic tribes corresponds to archeological evidence from Late Antiquity.

Pliny ca 80 CE in his Natural History (IV.99) lists the Ingvaeones as one of the five Germanic confederations, the others being the Vandili, the Istvaeones, the Hermiones and another group he does not name. According to him, the Ingvaeones were made up of Cimbri, Teutons, and Chauci. Stripped of its Latin ending, the Ingvaeon are the Ingwine, "friends of Ing" familiar from Beowulf, where Hrothgar is "Lord of the Ingwine"—whether one of them or lord over them being ambiguous.

Indigenous peoples are ethnic groups that are defined as "indigenous" according to one of the various definitions of the term, though there is no universally accepted definition.

In the late twentieth century, the term began to be used primarily to refer to ethnic groups that have historical ties to groups that existed in a territory prior to colonization or formation of a nation state, and which normally preserve a degree of cultural and political separation from the mainstream culture and political system of the nation state within the border of which the indigenous group is located. The political sense of the term defines these groups as particularly vulnerable to exploitation and oppression by nation states. As a result, a special set of political rights in accordance with international law have been set forth by international organizations such as the United Nations, the International Labour Organization and the World Bank. The United Nations have issued a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to protect the collective rights of indigenous peoples to their culture, identity, language, employment, health, education and natural resources. Depending on which precise definition of "indigenous people" used, and on the census, estimates of a world total population of Indigenous people range from 220 million Indigenous peoples in 1997 to 350 million in 2004.