There are 53 minority groups, totalling over 8 million people, are scattered over mountain areas (covering two-thirds of the country's territory) spreading from the North to the South. The most populated are Tay, Thai, Muong, Hoa, Khmer, Nung... with a population of around 1 million each, while the least populated are Brau, Roman, Odu with several hundred people each. Many of these 53 minority groups only have a few thousand members or so.

The Tay people, largest ethnic minority, live primarily in the mountains and foothills of northern Vietnam. Their language is a member of the Tai languages, belonging to the Central Tai subgroup and closely related to the Zhuang language of southern China.

The Thai people, the second largest minority group, is a name used by Vietnamese authorities for a group of people also from the mountainous northern region of Vietnam and whom western linguists say actually speak separate languages: Tai Dam, Tai Don, Tai Daeng, Tai Hang Tong, Tay Tac, and Tai Thanh. All these languages are closely related and belong to the Southwestern Tai subgroup of the Tai languages. This official Thai ethnicity should not be confused with the Thai people of Thailand. The Thai people of Thailand speak languages belonging to the Lao-Phutai branch of the Southwestern Tai subgroup, while the Thai of Vietnam speak languages belonging to the East Central branch of the Southwestern Tai subgroup. Although the Thai ethnicity is officially recognized in Vietnam, western linguistics do not recognize it and prefer to classify Tai Dam, Tai Don, Tai Daeng, etc.

The Muong people, the third largest minority group, live in the mountains of north central Vietnam and speak a Mon-Khmer language closely related to the Vietnamese language.

The Khmer, the fourth largest minority group, 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. There is no consensus on the exact number of Kho-me Crom living in Vietnam. The Vietnamese government reported 1,055,174 Khmer at the 1999 census.

The Hoa people (ethnic Han Chinese) are mainly lowlanders and, more specifically, urban dwellers. They speak predominantly Cantonese (known to the Vietnamese as Quang Dong), but there are also speakers of Hakka (Khach Gia), Min Nan/Hokkien/Fujian (Man Nam/Phuc Kien), Chaozhou (Trieu Chau), etc. Up to the 1979 Vietnamese census, the Hoa were the largest minority of Vietnam. However, since the North Vietnamese took over South Vietnam in 1975 many Hoa people left Vietnam, especially in the 1980s, so that at the 1999 census the Hoa were only the fifth largest minority.

A number of minorities had mastered some farming techniques. They grew rice plants in swamped paddy fields and carried out irrigation. Others went hunting, fishing, collecting and lived a semi-nomadic life. Each group has its own culture, diverse and special. Beliefs and religions of the Vietnamese ethnic minority groups were also disparate from each other.

However, a fundamental solidarity among ethnic groups has been established on top of this difference as a result of a centuries long cooperation on the soil of Vietnam. Right in the first century of the history, a mutual supplement in economic relationship between lowland people and mountainous people was formed. This solidarity had been unceasingly strengthened during wars of resistance for defending the country. Through the shared struggle for defending and building of the country and the mutual assistance for co-existence and development, a common community between the Viet people and other ethnic minority peoples had been established and continuously consolidated and developed.

Nonetheless, an evident gap in the material and moral life has indeed still existed between peoples living in the deltas and those living in mountain areas as well as among ethnic minorities themselves. The Vietnamese government has worked out specific policies and special treatments in order to help mountainous people catching up with lowland people, and made great efforts to develop and preserve traditional cultural identities of each ethnic minority group. At present, the programs of providing iodized salt for remote villages, equipping village's health care and hygienic station, fighting malaria, building free schools for ethnic minority children, settled agriculture and fixed residence, and projects of creating new writing scripts for minority peoples and studying and developing traditional culture of each ethnic minority group... have obtained sactifactory results.