Northern Thai people


The Northern Thai people or Tai Yuan , self-designation khon muang are a Tai ethnic group, native to eight provinces in Northern Thailand, principally in the area of the former kingdom of Lan Na. As a Tai group, they are closely related to Tai Lü and Tai Khün with regards to common culture, language and history as well as to Thailand's dominant Thai ethnic group. There are approximately 6 million Tai Yuan. Most of them live in Northern Thailand, with a small minority 29,442 living across the border in Bokeo Province and Sainyabuli Province and Luang Namtha Province of Laos. Their language is called Northern Thai, Lanna or Kham Mueang.

Exonym and endonym

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 muang, meaning "people of the land", "people of our community" or "society". 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 muang and cultivated rice on paddy fields. This distinguished them from the indigenous peoples of the area, 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 muang".
For the same reasons, the own name of the khon muang for their language is kammuang or kham muang, in which kam means language or word; muang 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 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.