Northern Thai people

Tai Yuan

Young dancer, Chiang Mai
Total population
(6 million)
Regions with significant populations
Thailand, Laos (Ban Houayxay, Bokeo Province and Sainyabuli Province)
Languages
Lanna (often bilingual with Central Thai)
Religion
Theravada Buddhism
Related ethnic groups
Tai peoples

The Northern Thai people or Tai Yuan (ไทยวน, [taj˧ ɲuːən˧]), self-designation khon mu(e)ang (ฅนเมือง,  [xon˧ mɯːəŋ˧], meaning "people of the (cultivated) land" or "people of our community") are the majority population of eight provinces in northern Thailand, principally in the area of the former kingdom of Lanna. They belong to the group of Tai peoples and are closely related to Tai Lü and Tai Khün with regards to common culture, language and history. There are approximately 6 million Tai Yuan. Most of them live in Northern Thailand, with a small minority 29,442 (2005 census) living across the border in Bokeo and Sainyabuli Provinces of Laos. Their language is called Northern Thai, Lanna, or Kham Mueang.

Exonym and endonym

Central Thai may call northern Thai people and their language Thai Yuan, probably derived from Sanskrit yavana meaning "stranger". In everyday speech, "Tai" prefixed to some location is understood as meaning "Tai person" of that place. The British colonial rulers in neighbouring Burma referred to them as "Siamese Shan", to distinguish them from the Shan proper, whom they called "Burmese Shan".

The people of this ethnicity refer to themselves as khon mueang, meaning "people of the (cultivated) land", "people of our community" or "society" (mueang is a central term in Tai languages having a broad meaning, essential to the social structure of Tai peoples). With this name, they historically identified themselves as the inhabitants of the alluvial plains, river valleys, and plateaus of their native area, where they lived in local communities called mueang and cultivated rice on paddy fields. This distinguished them from the indigenous peoples of the area ("hill tribes"), like the Lua', who lived in the wooded mountains practicing slash-and-burn agriculture. Membership of the ethnicity was therefore defined by lifestyle rather than by genetics. At the same time, it was a term of dissociation from the Burmese and Siamese, who held suzerainty over the Lanna Kingdom for centuries and who were not "people of our mueang".

For the same reasons, the own name of the khon mueang for their language is kammuang or kham mueang, in which kam means language or word; mueang town, hence the meaning "town language," in contrast to those of the many hill tribe peoples in the surrounding mountainous areas.

After the integration of Lanna into Thailand

During the Monthon reforms of the north region at the turn of the 20th century, the region of Lanna was assigned to Monthon Phayap (มณฑลพายัพ) from the Sanskrit word for "northwest". The Tai Tham alphabet formerly in use by northern Thai people is also called Lanna script. Due to the effects of Thaification in the wake of Monthon reforms, few northern Thai can read or write it, as it no longer represents accurately the orthography of the spoken form.

See also

• Ethnolinguistics
• Geography of Thailand SECTION Northern Thailand
• Lan Xang
• Linguistic anthropology
• Shan States
• Sociology of language