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The Dai is the officially recognized name of an ethnic group living in southern Yunnan Province of China, and also in Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, and Myanmar. They are also known as the Lü, Lue, or Thai Lue and Tai Nüa. The Dai people form one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China.Although they are officially recognized as a single people by the Chinese state, the Dai people form distinct cultural and linguistic groups. The two main languages of the Dai are Lü and Tai Nüa . Both are Tai languages, a group of related languages that includes Thai, Lao, and Zhuang, and part of the Tai-Kadai language family. Lü and Tai Nüa have distinct scriptsA writing system also called a script is used to visually record a language with symbols. The oldest kind of writing was pictographic or ideographical. Most writing systems can be broadly divided into three categories: logographic syllabic and alphabetic, derived from the Thai alphabetThe Thai alphabet is used to write the Thai language and other minority languages in Thailand. It has forty-four consonants , twenty-eight vowel forms and four tone marks . The consonants are written horizontally from left to right, while the vowels are a. The Dai peoples follow their traditional religion and Theravada Buddhism, and maintain similar customs and festivals to the other Tai-speaking peoples.
Dai people are typically farmers, growing a variety of tropical crops such as pineappleThe Pineapple Ananas comosus is a tropical plant and its fruit, native to Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay. The plant is a bromeliad (Family Bromeliaceae , a short, herbaceous perennial with thirty or more long, spined and pointed leaves surrounding a thicks, in addition to the staple crop of riceRice Rice fields on Java Scientific classification Kingdom: Plantae Division: Magnoliophyta Class: Liliopsida Order: Poales Family: Poaceae Genus: Oryza Species Oryza barthii ''Oryza glaberrima ''Oryza latifolia ''Oryza longistaminata ''Oryza punctata ''O. Many Dai people live near the MekongThe Mekong is one of the world's major rivers. It is the 12th longest in the world, and the 10th largest by volume (discharging 475 km³ of water annually). It drains an area of 795,000 km²: from Tibet it runs through China's Yunnan province, Myanmar, Thai river where it meanders through the far south of Yunnan.
Ethnic groups of China
