Origins
See also: Peopling of Thailand and Peopling of LaosIn a paper published in 2004, Linguist Laurent Sagart hypothesized that the proto-Tai–Kadai language originated as an Austronesian languages that migrants carried from Taiwan to mainland China. Afterwards, the language was then heavily influenced by local languages from Sino-Tibetan, Hmong–Mien, or other families, borrowing much vocabulary and converging typologically. Much closer to the present, some peoples speaking Tai languages migrated southward over the mountains into Southeast Asia, perhaps prompted by the coming of the Han Chinese to south China.
Linguistic heritage is not synonymous with genetic heritage, because of language shift where populations learn new languages. Tai people tend to have very high frequencies of Y-DNA haplogroup O2a with moderate frequencies of Y-DNA haplogroups O2a1 and O1. However, it is believed that the O1 Y-DNA haplogroup is associated with both the Austronesian people and the Tai. The prevalence of Y-DNA haplogroup O1 among Austronesian and Tai peoples also suggests a common ancestry with speakers of the Austroasiatic, Sino-Tibetan, and Hmong–Mien languages some 30,000 years ago in China. Y-DNA haplogroup O2a is found at high frequency among most Tai peoples, which is a trait that they share with the neighboring ethnic Austroasiatic peoples of Yunnan in southern China. Y-DNA haplogroups O1 and O2a are subclades of O Y-DNA haplogroup, which itself is a subclade of Y-DNA haplogroup K, a genetic mutation that is believed to have originated 40,000 years ago, somewhere between Iran and Central China.
Recent studies suggest that while modern speakers of Tai languages are largely genetic descendants of the progenitor of the O2a haplogroup, the Proto-Tai language (along with the Proto-Austronesian language) may be distantly related to the Ongan languages of the Andaman Islands, and together with Austronesian and Ongan languages, the Tai-Kadai languages may be a relic of the language(s) spoken by descendants of the progenitor of Y-DNA haplogroup D (Blevins 2007).
Read more about this topic: Tai Peoples
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