Foreword

After receiving many messages and phone calls asking for statistics and maps about ethnic groups in mainland Southeast Asia, we have decided to gather the official data which were locally available. However, these data, as all the attempts to map and/or count precisely the members of any ethnic group in the world, should be considered with caution. Some groups may be known under several names and these official classifications by Southeast Asian states are inevitably partial and/or incomplete. Similarly, ethnic maps can never account for the local complexity, dispersion and interrelations between various populations.