Vietnamese, used by a population of more than 90 million, is the official language of Vietnam.
Although languages in most of the Southeast Asian countries have been under great impact from Indian culture, Vietnamese, like Korean and Japanese, have been influenced hugely by the culture of Chinese characters. During the Chinese rule from 1st century AD to 10th century AD, a massive amount of Chinese vocabularies was introduced into Vietnamese, in which its pronunciation (Sino-Vietnamese) is similar to Middle Chinese but its grammar followed plenty of characteristics of Cambodian (Khmer). Despite having no tenses and conjugations and being a tone language like Chinese, the word order in Vietnamese is the opposite of Chinese, where this situation is similar to Thai.
In the early times, Vietnamese people did not invent an appropriate writing system for their own language. Starting from about the Eastern Han dynasty of China, Chinese characters (“Chữ Nho” in Vietnamese) were spread to Vietnam massively and systematically. In the Trần dynasty (Nhà Trần) of Vietnam, Chinese characters had become the major characters used by the government and the general public. Plenty of writings written in Chinese characters appeared at that time as well.
