Hani nationality, known as Akka nationality in Southeast Asia, whose national language is hani language, belongs to Yi branch of Tibeto-Burman language family of Sino-Tibetan language family. Modern Hani people use newly created phonetic symbols based on Latin letters.

Hani people are mainly distributed between Yuanjiang and Lancang River in China, living in counties such as Honghe, Jiangcheng, Mojiang, Xinping and Zhenyuan, and in the northern mountainous areas of Thailand, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam.

According to the statistics of the sixth national census in 20 10, the total population of Hani nationality in China is 1660932.