Thai people, historically known as Siamese people, are an ethnic group native to Thailand. In a narrower and ethnic sense, the Thais are also a Tai ethnic group dominant in Central Thailand (Siam proper).Cheesman, P. (1988). Lao textiles: ancient symbols-living art. Bangkok, Thailand: White Lotus Co., Thailand.Fox, M. (1997). A history of Laos. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.Fox, M. (2008). Historical Dictionary of Laos (3rd ed.). Lanham: Scarecrow Press.Goodden, C. (1999). Around Lan-na: a guide to Thailand's northern border region from Chiang Mai to Nan. Halesworth, Suffolk: Jungle Books. Thais are part of the larger Tai ethno-linguistic group native to Southeast Asia and southern China. They speak the Sukhothai languages, Central Thai and Southern Thai, which belong to the Kra–Dai family. The endonym has been derived both from a Proto-Tai word for a free person and, by Michel Ferlus, from an older word for a human being. Siam was the name used by outsiders, and in 1939 Plaek Phibunsongkhram renamed the country and its people Thailand and Thai. The majority of Thais are followers of Theravada Buddhism, whose practice also carries animist elements of Tai folk belief and Brahmanical elements from India and the Khmer world.
The central plain was settled long before the Tai reached it, and the name syam appears in Khmer inscriptions from the seventh century. Tai-speaking groups moved south into the Chao Phraya valley from about the tenth century, into country already held by Mon and Khmer speakers, and took up Theravada Buddhism and Khmer statecraft alongside their own traditions. Where they had come from before that is disputed, and proposals range from Guangxi to the Red River basin of northern Vietnam. Chinese records of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries call the polities of the lower Chao Phraya Xiān, a name that covered several port towns rather than a single place. Sukhothai in the upper valley and Ayutthaya in the lower became the leading centres of the following centuries, and the Chakri dynasty at Bangkok kept the kingdom independent through the colonial period.
A Thai nation was defined only at the beginning of the twentieth century, under Prince Damrong and King Vajiravudh. Government policies during the late 1930s and early 1940s assimilated various ethno-linguistic groups into the country's dominant Central Thai language and culture, and the term Thai people came to refer to the population of Thailand overall. This includes other Tai subgroups such as the Northern Thais and the Isan people, and groups that are neither Tai nor Southeast Asian. The largest of the latter is the Han Chinese, about 12 to 15 percent of the population. Regional languages and cultures persist beneath the standard one. Most live in Thailand, with communities abroad. Genetic research groups the population by the family each language belongs to, and finds the differences between the four regions slight. Most Kra-Dai-speaking groups are read as a mixture of migrants from southern China with Austroasiatic-speaking populations already present.
Etymology
Names By endonym, Thai people refer themselves as (, ), whose term eventually being derived from Proto-Tai meaning free, which emphasise that Thailand has never been a colony in the late modern period. Academically, Thai people are referred to as the Chao Phraya Thais (, Thai lum chao phraya).
Ethnically, Thai people are called Siamese (, ) or Thai Siam (, thai sayam), which refers to the Tai people inhabited in Central and Southern Thailand; Siamese people are subdivided into three groups: Khon Phak Klang (, lit: Central Thai people) or Khon Tai (, lit: Southern Thai people) and Khorat Thai (). Siamese was also, by historically, the exonym of those people. In Du royaume de Siam, Simon de la Loubère recorded that the people whom he spoke were Tai Noi (), which were different from Shan people (or Tai Yai), who lived on the mountainous area of what is now Shan State in Myanmar. On 24 June 1939, however, Plaek Phibunsongkhram formally renamed the country and its people Thailand and Thai people respectively.
Due to the partial success of Thaification, the term Thai people, often creates ambiguity among the various Tai groups in the country, especially the Sino-Thai who also call themselves the same.
Origin of the name
According to Michel Ferlus, the ethnonyms Thai/Tai (or Thay/Tay) would have evolved from the etymon *k(ə)ri: 'human being' through the following chain: *kəri: > *kəli: > *kədi:/*kədaj > *di:/*daj > *dajA (Proto-Southwestern Tai) > tʰajA2 (in Siamese and Lao) or > tajA2 (in the other Southwestern and Central Tai languages classified by Li Fangkuei).Ferlus, Michel (2009). Formation of Ethnonyms in Southeast Asia. 42nd International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics, Nov 2009, Chiang Mai, Thailand. 2009, p.3. Michel Ferlus' work is based on some simple rules of phonetic change observable in the Sinosphere and studied for the most part by William H. Baxter (1992).Pain, Frédéric (2008). An Introduction to Thai Ethnonymy: Examples from Shan and Northern Thai. Journal of the American Oriental Society Vol. 128, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec. 2008), p.646.
Michel Ferlus notes that a deeply rooted belief in Thailand has it that the term "Thai" derives from the last syllables -daya in Sukhodaya/ Sukhothay (สุโขทัย), the name of the Sukhothai Kingdom. The spelling emphasizes this prestigious etymology by writing ไทย (transliterated ai-d-y) to designate the Thai/ Siamese people, while the form ไท (transliterated ai-d) is occasionally used to refer to Tai speaking ethnic groups. Lao writes ໄທ (transliterated ai-d) in both cases. The word "Tai" (ไท) without the final letter ย is also used by Thai people to refer to themselves as an ethnicity, as historical texts such as "Mahachat Kham Luang", composed in 1482 during the reign of King Borommatrailokkanat. The text separates the words "Tai" (ไท) from "Tet" (เทศ), which means foreigners. Similarly, "Yuan Phai", a historical epic poem written in the late 15th to early 16th century, also used the word "Tai" (ไท). David K. Wyatt notes that a northern sixty-year cycle of days and years appears in at least nine early inscriptions and is unique to Tai-language texts, where it is regularly named Thai in contradistinction to Khōm. He reads the claim of the Ram Khamhaeng inscription to have invented Tai letters narrowly, as a claim to one particular form of writing rather than to writing itself.
The French diplomat Simon de la Loubère, mentioned that, "The Siamese give to themselves the Name of Tai, or Free, and those that understand the Language of Pegu, affirm that Siam in that Tongue signifies Free. 'Tis from thence perhaps that the Portugues have derived this word, having probably known the Siamese by the Peguan. Nevertheless Navarete in his Historical Treatises of the Kingdom of China, relates that the Name of Siam, which he writes Sian, comes from these two words Sien lo, without adding their signification, or of what Language they are; altho' it may be presumed he gives them for Chinese, Mueang Tai is therefore the Siamese Name of the Kingdom of Siam (for Mueang signifies Kingdom) and this word wrote simply Muantay, is found in Vincent le Blanc, and in several Geographical Maps, as the Name of a Kingdom adjoining to Pegu: But Vincent le Blanc apprehended not that this was the Kingdom of Siam, not imagining perhaps that Siam and Tai were two different Names of the same People. In a word, the Siamese, of whom I treat, do call themselves Tai Noe, *little Siams. There are others, as I was informed, altogether savage, which are called Tai yai, great Siams, and which do live in the Northern Mountains."
Based on a Chinese source, the Ming Shilu, Zhao Bo-luo-ju, described as "the heir to the old Ming-tai prince of the country of Xian-luo-hu", () sent an envoy to China in 1375. Geoff Wade suggested that Ming Tai () might represent the word "Muang Tai" while the word Jiu () means old.
History
The Siamese before the Tai
The present-day Thai people were previously called "Siamese" before the country was renamed Thailand in the mid-20th century. Wyatt used the same term for the people of the Central Plain before the ethnic categories hardened, expressly not as a synonym for Thai, to convey what he called an ethnicity in the process of becoming.
The peoples of Southeast Asia have been divided into five groups, the Mon-Khmer, the Viet-Muong, the Tay-Thai, the Hmong-Dzao and a southern island group comprising the Cham, Gia Rai and Ede. On that division the Tay and the Thai share a common origin.
The toponym or ethnonym siam or syam appears in several pre-Angkorian inscriptions, and earlier scholars have interpreted it as denoting either a geographical locality or an ethnolinguistic group within the Chao Phraya Basin; those inscriptions include K557 (611 CE), K127 (683 CE), K154 (685 CE), K79 (639 CE), and K904 (713 CE). Theodore Pigeaud identified the syangka of the Old Javanese Deśawarṇana with the same term, taking it for the Syam of a mid-11th-century Cham inscription and of 13th-century Khmer inscriptions.
The Chinese sources record a 6th-century polity known as Qiān Zhī Fú (), which some scholars have speculated was centered at Si Thep. The prefix qiān (千) phonetically resembles Xiān (暹), the name Chinese records of the late 13th and 14th centuries use for the port polities of the Gulf of Thailand, among them Ayodhya and Suphan Buri. Đại Việt sources use the same graph for the peoples and polities of the Chao Phraya River basin. On this basis, Tatsuo Hoshino proposed that Qiān Zhī Fú represented one of the early Siamese city-states—later subject to Tainization—that flourished through their participation in the trans-Mekong trade networks linking Champa in the east with the Menam Basin in the west.
The present-day descendants of the Qiān population, also known as the Nyah Kur people, who are not Tainized and maintain the Nyah Kur language—an archaic survival of Old Mon—reside primarily in the highland region surrounding the ancient center of Si Thep, with notable concentrations along the borderlands of Chaiyaphum, Phetchabun, Lopburi, and Nakhon Ratchasima provinces.
Arrival of the Tai
There have been many theories proposing the origin of the Tai peoples — of which the Thai are a subgroup — including an association of the Tai people with the Ai Lao and Kingdom of Nanzhao. The mid-20th-century view that made Nanzhao a centre of Tai expansion has since been rejected. A linguistic study has suggested that the origin of the Tai people may lie around Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of southern China, where the Zhuang people currently account for approximately one third of the total population. The Qin dynasty founded Guangdong in 214 BC, initiating varying successive waves of Han Chinese from the north for centuries to come.