Initial States of Thailand - Population

Population

The result of population movements and migrations certainly affected cultural traditions and lifestyles found among the peoples who are to populate the kingdom of Thailand. Therefore the Thai / Sama / Sayam / Siam is the various indigenous peoples, Proto Malayu, Mon, Khmer, Champa, as well as to immigrants from India. In addition, the population also consisted of coastal peoples, some mariners, Chinese, and a host of other minority groups. This important characteristic is “The great variety” of Thai people.

Thai society and culture covered an area far wider than that ruled by the state. Tai peoples refers collectively to the ethnic groups of southern China and Southeast Asia, stretching from Hainan to eastern India and from southern Sichuan to Thailand, that speak the Tai languages and share similar traditions and festivals, including Songkran. Despite never having a unified nation-state of their own, the peoples also share or historically shared a vague idea of a "Siam" nation, corrupted to Shan or Assam in some places, and most self-identify as "Tai". A far more comprehensive list is available in Thai only for this term. For example, 29 ethnic groups & languages are identified as "Tai" in the Thai language version in People's Republic of China alone. Tai peoples include:

  • The Lao of Laos and Northeast Thailand
  • The Northern Thai (Lanna or Thai Yuan) of Thailand
  • The Thai of Thailand (Tai Noi or Little Tai)
  • The Shan (Thai Yai or Big Tai) of Burma
  • The Zhuang of China
  • The Buyei of China
  • The Thai Lue of Laos and China (also called "Dai")
  • The Nung of China, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam
  • The Black Tai (Tai Dam) of Laos and Vietnam
  • The Red Tai (Tai Daeng)
  • The White Tai (Tai Kao)
  • The Tai Dom people of present day North Vietnam
  • The various tribes in Yunnan, China.

Read more about this topic:  Initial States Of Thailand

Famous quotes containing the word population:

    “The paid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “[Madness] is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime.”
    —Kate Millett (b. 1934)

    “The population question is the real riddle of the sphinx, to which no political Oedipus has as yet found the answer. In view of the ravages of the terrible monster over-multiplication, all other riddle sink into insignificance.”
    —Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)