Lao people

Lao
ລາວ (Lao) · ลาว (Thai)
Total population
3,427,665 in Laos (2015 census): 37
Regions with significant populations
Laos: the Mekong lowlands, from Vientiane and Xayaboury to Champasak Thailand: Northeastern Thailand (Isan)
Languages
Lao; in Thailand also Isan and Thai
Religion
Buddhism, with spirit (phi) cults
Related ethnic groups
Phu Thai, Nyaw, Yoy, Kaloeng, Thai

The Lao (Lao ລາວ; Thai ลาว) are a Tai-speaking people of the middle Mekong. They are the largest ethnic group of Laos, where the 2015 census counted 3,427,665 Lao, 53.2 per cent of the population.^: 37 A larger population of Lao speech and culture lives across the river in Northeastern Thailand, the region called Isan.^: 38 Many of them have come to call themselves khon isan, "Isan people".^: 3

The present division of the Lao between two states goes back to the 19th century. After the defeat of the Vientiane king Anouvong in 1827–1828, Siam destroyed Vientiane and moved much of the population of the left bank of the Mekong to the right bank.^: 1 The Franco-Siamese treaty of 1893 then made the river a border, ceding the Lao lands of the left bank to France.^: 12 Lao is the national language of Laos. The Lao of Isan speak a variety that Thailand classes as a dialect of Thai and that its speakers have traditionally called Lao. Lowland Lao life centres on glutinous rice grown in paddy fields, on Buddhism blended with the cult of spirits and on the music of the khaen mouth organ. Cannabis, kan xa in Lao, was sold openly in Laos in the early 1970s. A seed seller associates ganja culture in Laos and Thailand above all with the ethnic Lao.

Name and identity

As an ethnic name, Lao refers to the people who are ethnically Lao and not to members of the other peoples of the country; Laotian is used in English for all the people of Laos.^: Preface In its civic sense the word covers every citizen of Laos: the 2005 census asked "Lao citizens", 99.6 per cent of those enumerated, about their ethnicity.^{: sections 1.7, 1.9} Some Lao intellectuals of the 1940s regretted that the French had fixed the country's name with a final s, as "Laos".^: 3

A three-part scheme long divided the peoples of Laos into Lao Loum ("lowland Lao"), Lao Theung ("Lao of the mountain slopes") and Lao Soung ("upland Lao").^: 36 The Lao Loum include the Lao themselves and other speakers of Tai languages such as the Lue, Tai Dam and Tai Deng. The Lao Theung are peoples of Austroasiatic speech and the Lao Soung are Miao-Yao and Tibeto-Burman speakers of the northern uplands.^{: Ethnic Diversity} In the early 1990s villagers asked their ethnicity by outsiders were likely to answer with one of the three categories rather than with their own group.^{: Ethnic Diversity} Since 2000 the Lao state has instead recognised 49 ethnic groups in four ethno-linguistic families.^: 77

Before 1893 the people of what is now northern Thailand were also called Lao. In the 1890s several of Siam's regional administrations bore the name: monthon lao phuan and monthon lao kao in the present lower north-east and monthon lao chiang in the north.^: 8 Between 1894 and 1900 many monthon were renamed for their direction from Bangkok. Thai school textbooks then taught Lao identity as a form of Thai. In the north-east official policy on language and education aimed to turn the Lao into khon isan.^: 8–9 The historian Justin McDaniel, quoted by Easum, wrote that "Lao and Thai became natural, eternal, and, therefore, real divisions, even though there is little evidence that they existed in precisely this way historically".^: 9

Population and distribution

The 2005 census of Laos counted 3,067,005 Lao, 54.6 per cent of the population, and found the Lao to be the main group in Vientiane Capital and in Vientiane, Xayaboury, Khammuane, Savannakhet, Saravane and Champasack provinces.^{: Table 1.6, section 1.9} The 2015 census counted 3,427,665, 53.2 per cent.^: 36–37 The Lao-Tai ethno-linguistic family, which takes in the Lao and the other Tai-speaking groups, fell from 66 per cent of the population in 1995 to 62.4 per cent in 2015.^: 9 The anthropologist Yves Goudineau considers any such calculation largely arbitrary for want of systematic ethno-linguistic surveys. Reading a census by the four families, he puts the Lao-Tai at less than half of the population and the Lao proper at a much lower share.^: 38

In Thailand the Lao are the great majority of the Tai-speaking people of the north-east, but the classifications of Thai censuses do not count them separately.^: 2 In Sakon Nakhon Province the Lao are the majority of the Sakon Nakhon basin, beside the Kaloeng, Nyaw, Phu Thai and Yoy.^: 3 The provincial statistical office places them in Charoen Sin, Sawang Daen Din, Song Dao and Kham Ta Kla districts.^: [ix]

Language

Lao (ISO 639-3 lao) is the statutory national language of Laos under Article 89 of the 2003 constitution. Glottolog also lists it for Thailand and Cambodia. In a speech of 1981 the party leader Kaysone Phomvihane said that written and spoken Lao "must be the common language of the nation", with the Lao script as the link between all its ethnic groups.^: 42

Lao and Thai belong to the Southwestern branch of the Tai languages. Pittayawat Pittayaporn proposes a "Peninsular" subgroup within it that joins Thai, Lao, Southern Thai and most of the smaller varieties he labels PH.^: 7 Earlier classifications differed. Brown, in 1965, put Lao and Phu Thai in one subgroup. In Chamberlain's scenario Thai reached central Thailand from north-eastern Laos, and the Lao came into north-east Thailand from northern Laos a few centuries later, breaking a continuum of Thai, Phuan and Phu Thai.^: 11 The earliest inscriptions in the Lao script, also called Thai Noi, are found in north-east Thailand.^: 13

History

Settlement of the Khorat Plateau

The Lao chronicle tradition credits Fa Ngum, the 14th-century founder of the kingdom of Lan Xang, with resettling some 20,000 Lao families around Vientiane and in the northern Khorat Plateau. Charles Keyes, reporting the historian Maha Sila Viravong, took this as perhaps the first sign of a large Lao migration into what is now north-east Thailand.^: 6 Ryan Wolfson-Ford holds that the plateau stayed under Lao rule for some 300 years after a 16th-century war with Siam, and that Siam extended its control over the whole plateau only in the war of 1827–1828.^: 8

The removals of 1827–1850s

In early 1827 Anouvong of Vientiane went to war with Siam. His defeat left the surviving Lao kingdoms under Siamese power.^: 105 Rama III ordered Vientiane destroyed and its population deported to the Central Plains of Siam. The territories of Vientiane and Champasak became provinces answerable to Bangkok. Only Luang Prabang kept some autonomy.^: 11

Siam followed a policy of depopulating the left bank so that an invader from Vietnam would find no food, transport or recruits there. From 1837 to 1847 Siamese forces raided Khamkeut, Khammouan and the Xe Banghiang valley each dry season, and whole Lao villages were uprooted. Siam founded new towns on the right bank, among them Chiang Khan, Nong Khai, Mukdahan and Kemmarat.^: Siam Wolfson-Ford dates these campaigns to the 1830s–1850s. In his account they effectively created the modern Isan region by peopling it and modern Laos by emptying it, and for most of the 19th century the region within Siam was known as the "Lao provinces".^{: 1, 9} The settler peoples of the Sakon Nakhon basin, the Phu Thai, Kaloeng, Nyaw and Yoy, came across the river in the same period.^: 3

Under Siamese rule the plateau was governed through the Lao noble houses and their hereditary hierarchies, and in the outer Lao provinces local hierarchies built on kinship prevailed.^: 49–50

The border of 1893

The Franco-Siamese treaty of 1893, signed under a French military ultimatum, ceded all the Lao areas on the left bank of the Mekong to France. The treaty of 1904 added two areas on the right bank, Sayaboury opposite Luang Prabang and Champasak.^: 12 The border has stayed in place since 1904, apart from a brief interval in the Second World War.^: 12 For Lao historians 1893 was a partition of Laos between the Thai and French states: until then the Mekong had connected the Lao, and from then on it divided them.^: 1 Maha Sila Viravong, born in Isan, wrote the History of Laos (1955) that shaped Lao historical writing for decades.^: 106

On the Siamese side, administrative reform brought the region under provincial officials answerable to Bangkok.^: 18 The "Holy Man's" rising of 1901–1902, led by men known as phu mi bun, spread across north-east Siam, southern Laos and the adjacent Vietnamese highlands. Siam put it down within a few months, while on the French side of the river it went on.^{: 47, 59, 66}

Isan

Isan is the name used throughout Thailand for the north-eastern region and for its dominant people. The word comes from Pali and Sanskrit, unlike the names of Thailand's other regions.^: 3 In Thai usage the Lao of the north-east are also called Thai Lao (ไทยลาว), Lao Isan (ลาวอีสาน) or simply khon isan.^{: 170: 6152} Some scholars writing in English use Thai-Lao.^: 559 Charles Keyes, who used the term for "the Lao who live in Thailand", reserved Thai for the Central Thai.^: 63 A survey of the languages of Isan cited by Sudarat Maswanna counts at least 11 Tai peoples in the region, the Lao Isan first among them, beside the Phu Thai, Nyaw, Yoy and Kaloeng.^: 146

Names of the region

Before 1893 Siam grouped the Lao towns of the plateau and the left bank into four divisions, each under a commissioner: the Lao Phuan at Nong Khai, the Lao Kao at Champasak, the Lao Isan at Ubon and the Lao Klang at Khorat. After the loss of the left bank there were three monthon in the north-east: Khorat, Udon and Isan, the last with its seat at Ubon.^: 67–68 Saowanee Alexander and Duncan McCargo, citing Wongthes, date the official name Isan to 1899, under the centralising reforms of Rama V. A Monthon Isan with a high commissioner was in place by 1901.^: 55

Language

The Lao speech of the north-east, phasa isan, is officially a dialect of Thai. Linguistically it is close to Lao, its speakers have traditionally called it Lao, and several linguists also call it Lao. Glottolog calls it Northeastern Thai (ISO 639-3 tts), with Isan among its other names, and lists it for Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. On Ethnologue's scale it is a developing language, used in practice as the language of provincial identity in the east and north-east. In the 1960s written phasa isan, used by presses printing traditional north-eastern literature, was set in Siamese script rather than Lao.^: 64 In a 2012 study of 145 speakers in Ubon Ratchathani, mostly university students, Alexander and McCargo found Central Thai to be the high variety and phasa isan the low one, in a diglossia they judged to be in transition.

Numbers

Censuses in Thailand do not record ethnicity in a way that measures the Lao. Keyes estimated that at least eight million of the north-east's 1960 population spoke Tai dialects as their first language. Probably at least 95 per cent of them were closer in language and culture to the Lao of Laos than to the Central Thai.^: 2 The region then held nearly 9 million of Thailand's 26.3 million people.^: 2 In his foreword to Keyes's study, Lauriston Sharp, director of the Cornell Thailand Project, wrote that the region held "three times as many Lao as does Laos".^: v The 2010 census counted about 19 million residents of Isan, 28.8 per cent of the population of Thailand. There are no official figures for speakers of phasa isan. Alexander and McCargo estimate conservatively that at least 80 per cent of the region's people, 15.9 million, speak it.

Regional identity

Keyes found in the 1960s that north-easterners identified on different occasions with their own community, with the people of their region, with the people of Laos and with the Central Thai.^: viii They had once called themselves khon phuen mueang ("natives") or Lao. Isan, a name used for them by people of other regions, had been taken up as a mark of their own identity only recently.^: 3 Centralised administration and schooling made them feel that political power belonged to the "Thai" and that their own culture was held to be inferior to that of the Central Thai.^{: 18, 20} During the Franco-Thai war of 1940–1941, Bangkok proclaimed that the peoples of the territories it claimed belonged "racially" to the Thai kingdom. North-easterners who heard this understood that Bangkok regarded Isan and Lao as ethnically inseparable.^: 27

For Alexander and McCargo the region is Lao-dominant but multiethnic, economically deprived and held to be lower in status than the rest of Thailand. Among Thai speakers, especially teenagers, Lao is a slang word implying backwardness and unattractiveness. Summarising research by McCargo and Hongladarom among students and villagers in Maha Sarakham, they report that the students were unsure of their Lao and Thai identities, and that state promotion of an Isan identity serves to distance north-easterners from a sense of being Lao.

Society

Lowland Lao villages stand near rivers and streams, or in valleys with land for paddy. A village typically has 40 or 50 houses and 200 to 300 people. Houses are raised on wooden piles, with a separate rice granary in the compound.^{: Lowland Lao Society} Kinship is reckoned on both sides. Households are nuclear or stem families, and a newly married couple first lives with or near the bride's family.^{: Lowland Lao Society}

Loes Schenk-Sandbergen writes of a matrilineal and matrilocal tradition of the Lao Lum, under which women inherit land from their parents. In studies in Laos in 1995 and 1998 she found it gradually undermined, above all by land legislation and male-dominated land titling.^: 66 In her fieldwork, Lao Lum villagers held that women should have their own kin around them in times of crisis, above all in pregnancy and after childbirth.^: 70

Among the Thai Lao of Ban Chiang Mai in Pho Chai District, Roi Et, senior kin (chao khot) act both as heads of lineages and as community leaders. The disputes they settle often concern offences against the spirits.^: 177

Religion

Virtually all lowland Lao were Buddhists in the early 1990s. Buddhism was the state religion of the Kingdom of Laos.^: Religion Belief in spirits, phi, runs through all parts of Lao society and is blended with Buddhism at village level. Each lowland village makes an annual offering to its guardian spirit, the phi ban. Many Lao Loum hold that 32 spirits, the khwan, protect a person, and that illness follows when some of them leave the body. The soukhwan or baci ceremony calls them back. Cotton strings are tied around the participants' wrists to hold them in place. The baci welcomes guests, marks departures and recoveries and is the central rite of weddings and of the naming of a child.^: Animism

In Isan the Thai Lao practise a village Buddhism adapted to local custom and keep up the cult of ancestral spirits. Every rural community has its shrine to the village guardian spirit pu ta.^: 170 In Luang Prabang the Lao still honour PuYer-YaYer, the ancestor spirits who guard the city, at the Songkran new year. At the festival elders sometimes take strands fallen from the figures' hair, which is made of hemp, and tie them round children's wrists for protection.^: 101

Culture

The khaen is a mouth organ of bamboo pipes of different lengths, each with a metal reed. In 2017 UNESCO inscribed the khaen music of the Lao people on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The music is part of village festivals, where listeners join in the songs and dances. The instrument is played by both Thai and Lao. It is the national instrument of Laos and is central to lam or mor lam, a form of sung poetic storytelling also practised in Isan.^{: 9312–9313}

Glutinous rice is the staple. It is steamed, eaten with the fingers and dipped in soups and other dishes.^{: Lowland Lao Society} Fermented fish, pla ra or pla daek, is used as a condiment and a dish in Thailand and Laos. In north-eastern cooking it seasons som tam, green papaya salad, and other dishes.

Economy and livelihood

The lowland Lao village economy is built on paddy rice. Work runs from the start of the rains in May until the harvest is stored in December. Families form work groups for transplanting and harvesting. Where level land is short, lowland Lao also farm rice in swiddens.^{: Lowland Lao Society} In Non Ku village in Khon Kaen, almost all of whose people were Thai-Lao, rice farmers kept up soil quality with organic materials and named soil types in Lao.^: 559–560

Plants and medicine

Palm-leaf manuscripts, bailan in Lao, were made by Buddhist monks to keep religious records. Many monks were also healers and recorded their treatments in palm-leaf and paper manuscripts, some at least two centuries old. Most of the healing manuscripts prescribe plants for particular ailments. A search of medical manuscripts by linguists produced a list of more than 7,000 diseases.^{: 1, 6}

In Pakkading District of Bolikhamxai Province, a study of medicinal plant use among the Lao, Tai and Khmu recorded 111 species. The Lao and Tai shared the most species, about 41 per cent.^{: 113, 116} In Na Ngam village in Pho Chai District of Roi Et Province, 37 Lao Isan informants interviewed between July 2022 and July 2023 named 317 plant species in use, 201 of them for food and spices and 154 as medicinal herbs.^: 6152

Cannabis

Cannabis is kan xa in Lao, a name that, like its Thai, Khmer and Vietnamese counterparts, comes from the Sanskrit gañjā. In Lao usage the male plant was kan xa phu or kan xa dok and the female kan xa me.^: 64–65 In the early 1970s the ethnobotanist Marie Alexandrine Martin found cannabis sold freely in Laos: flowering stems for smoking and cheaper stems without flowers for soup. She judged cultivation there hardly more widespread than in Cambodia. Thirteen kilometres downstream from Vientiane lay Ban Het Kansa, "the village of the hemp-covered sand bank", where she found no trace of the plant left.^: 66–67 Her account of the plant in Laos is summarised on the page for Laos.

At Na Ngam in Roi Et, the Lao Isan grow Cannabis sativa, which they call กัญซา. They use its stems, leaves and flowers as food or spice and as a medicinal herb.^{: 6157, 6167}

The Real Seed Company, a seed seller, writes in the catalogue listing for its Central Lao seed line (Central Lao General Population 2022), from Vientiane Province, that ganja and the culture around it, in both Laos and Thailand, are "most closely associated with the ethnic Lao". The listing states that before the late 1960s ganja grown in "ethnically Lao northern Isan" and Vientiane Province supplied the city of Vientiane. In its account the arrival of Western travellers then joined these growers to demand in Europe and the Americas. The same seller's listing for its Lao Gold line states that cultivation in Laos and Isan "is not exclusive to any particular ethnic group".

Accessions

No accessions documented yet.

See also

• Kaloeng people
• Laos
• Northeastern Thailand
• Nyaw people
• Phu Thai people
• Sakon Nakhon Province
• Thai people
• Yoy people