Vietnam is a multi-ethnic country, so there are various languages, which can be roughly divided into three language families. The first is the South Asian language family, whose users account for 97% of the total population of Vietnam, including 36 ethnic groups, belonging to Vietnamese, Yumco-Khmer, Miao-Yao and Thai-Dai languages. Followed by the Sino-Tibetan language family, accounting for about 2% of the total population, including 9 ethnic groups, belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family and the Tibetan-Burmese language family. The third is Austronesian language family, including five ethnic groups, accounting for 0.9% of the total population of Vietnam.
The most commonly used characters in Vietnam are Vietnamese characters with 23 letters, 6 vowels and 17 consonants. In modern times, the vocabulary and grammatical structure of French, English and Russian are more and more used in Vietnamese, which makes Vietnamese have some characteristics of Indo-European family.
Chinese characters have been used for a long time in Vietnamese history. /kloc-After the 0/0 century, China culture had a great influence, and Chinese characters were still officially advocated. Until the beginning of19th century, Chinese was widely used by feudal elites in Vietnam. Chinese characters are used in court documents and imperial examination papers, and couplets in temples are also written in Chinese characters.