The Zhuang language (autonym: Cuengh; Chinese: 壮语; pinyin: Zhuàngyǔ) is used by the Zhuang people in the People's Republic of China. Most of them live in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Zhuang is an official language in that Region. Language use is however rapidly declining as the Zhuang assimilate to the Han Chinese.
Bouyei, considered a separate language in China, is actually just a slightly different standard form of Zhuang, used across the province border in Guizhou. There is a dialect continuum between Zhuang and Bouyei.
Zhuang had been written with ideographs that were borrowed from Han characters adopted to this language, and original characters made out by using the similar manner of construction, for more than a thousand years, similar to Vietnamese Chu Nom. In 1957, in the People's Republic of China a Latin alphabet with some special letters was introduced to write the new standardised Zhuang language. A spelling reform in 1986 replaced these special letters with regular letters of the Latin alphabet to facilitate printing and the use of computers. The table below compares spelling before and after the 1986 reform.
By contrast, the ethnic minorities, except for the Khơ-me Crôm (Khmer Krom) and the Hoa (ethnic Han Chinese), are found mostly in the highlands that cover two-thirds of the national territory.
Their language is a member of the Tai languages, belonging to the Central Tai subgroup and closely related to the Zhuanglanguage of southern China.
According to official figures, 86.2% of the population speak Vietnamese as a native language.
The Khơ-me Crôm (Khmer Krom) live in the fertile delta of the Mekong River in southern Vietnam and are ethnically the same as the Khmer people who make up the majority of the population of Cambodia.
In particular, the large Khơ-me Crôm (Khmer Krom) minority of southern Vietnam is denied elementary human rights in an effort by the Vietnamese government to Vietnamize the Khmer Krom, or force them to leave their native land and relocate to Cambodia.
Southern music exudes a lively laissez faire attitude, probably due to the region's relative prosperity.
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