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( Tai peoples)
"Thai peoples" redirects here. For the subgroup of the Tai, see Thai people The Tai or Tai-Kadai ethnicity refers collectively to the ethnic groups of southern China and Southeast Asia, stretching from Hainan to eastern India and from southern Sichuan to Laos, Thailand, and parts of Vietnam, which speak languages in the Tai-Kadai family and share similar traditions and festivals, including Songkran.[1] Despite never having a unified nation-state of their own, the peoples also have historically shared a vague idea of a "Siam" nation, corrupted to Shan or Assam in some places, and most self-identify as "Tai". Comparative linguistic research seems to indicate that the Tai people were a proto Tai-Kadai speaking culture of southern China, and that they may have originally been of Austronesian descent.[2] Prior to inhabiting mainland China, the Tai are suspected to have migrated from a homeland on the island of Taiwan where they spoke a dialect of Proto-Austronesian or one of its descendant languages.[2] After the arrival of Sino-Tibetan speaking ethnic groups from mainland China to the island of Taiwan, the Tai would have then migrated into mainland China, perhaps along the Pearl River, where their language greatly changed in character from the other Austronesian languages under influence of Sino-Tibetan and Hmong-Mien language infusion. The coming of the Han Chinese to this region of southern China may have prompted the Tai to migrate in mass once again, this time southward over the mountains into Southeast Asia.[3] While this theory of the origin of the Tai is currently the leading theory, there is insufficient archaeological evidence to prove or disprove the proposition at this time, and the linguistic evidence alone is not conclusive. However, in further support of the theory, 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 the Sino-Tibetan, Austro-Asiatic and Hmong-Mien peoples some 35,000 years ago in China.[4] Y-DNA Haplogroup O2a is also found at high frequency among most Tai peoples, which is a trait that they share with the neighboring Austroasiatic peoples. 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 somewhere between Iran and Central China.[5] In addition to the ethnicities previously mentioned, the progenitor of Haplogroup K was probably the ancestor of nearly all modern Melanesian people, as well as the Mongols and the Native Americans. Haplogroup K, in turn, is a subclade of Y-DNA Haplogroup F, which is believed to have originated in Northern Africa or Southwest Asia some 45,000 years ago. Haplogroup F is believed to be associated with the second major wave of migration out of the African continent.[citation needed] In addition to the ethnicities previously mentioned, the progenitor of Haplogroup F was probably the ancestor of all Indo-Europeans. The exact structure of the clades of the Tai ethnicity are a topic of present debate among linguists and other social scientists. There is not a current consensus as to the stratification. However, there is a general consensus as to the existence of the following distinct groups
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