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'Mlabri' is a language and an ethnic group of people in Thailand and Laos, and known as ''Phi Tong Luang'' (ผีตองเหลือง) among Thais. Only about 300 or fewer Mlabris remain in the world today, with some estimates as low as 100. A hill tribe in northern Thailand along the border with Laos, they have been groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers. The group in Thailand live in close proximity to the Hmong and northern Thai. The group living in Laos live in close proximity to other ethnic groups as well.
Genetic analysis of the Mlabri group by Hiroki Oota and colleagues led them to observe that the mtDNA has little diversity, suggesting to them that the Mlabris were founded 500-800 years ago from very few individuals. This hypothesis was contested in the journal PLoS Biology in 2005 in an exchange of articles between Hiroki Oota and colleagues, and Tony Waters.
The Mlabri language is usually classified as a Khmuic language. Linguist Jørgen Rischel has studied the language and described its peculiarities in several works. He divides the language into three varieties: one spoken by a small group in Laos and previously called ''Yumbri'', and two others spoken by larger groups in Thailand. They differ in intonation and in lexicon.
German anthropologist Hugo Bernatzik published an ethnography of the "Yellow Leaf People" in 1958 which reflected his brief observations of the tribe in the mid-20th century.

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External links and bibliography

External links and bibliography

★ Hugo Bernatzik "The Spirits of the Yellow Leaves" London: R. Hale. Translated by E. W. Dickson. 1958.

★ Hiroki Oota and others, "Recent Origin and Cultural Reversion of a Hunter-Gatherer Group", ''PLoS biology'', 2005 March, volume 3, number 3.

★ Tony Waters, "Comment on 'Recent Origin and Cultural Reversion of a Hunter-Gatherer Group," PLoS Biology 2005 August, volume 3, number 8.

★ Jørgen Rischel, ''Minor Mlabri. A Hunter-Gatherer Language of Northern Indochina'', 1995, ISBN 87-7289-294-3.

★ Jørgen Rischel, ''Pan-dialectal databases: Mlabri, an oral Mon-Khmer language'', 2004 May, Lexicography Conference, Chiangmai.

★ Jørgen Rischel, ''In what sense is Mlabri a West Khmuic language?''

★ Bryan Watt, MlaBri People - page with photographs of Mlabri people.