People of Moken

The Moken are an Austronesian ethnic group that occupies the west coast of Thailand on the Andaman Sea. They also occupy the Mergui Archipelago off Myanmar’s coast.

Austronesians include populations of migrants, nomads, farmers, and especially seafarers who colonized an area of several million square kilometres. They crossed great distances through cultural or geographic boundaries, the Sulu Empire, maritime powers, mainland empires, emerging nations, straits... that temporarily stopped their movements and allowed them to recompose their fragmented ethnicity.

The Moken language belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. The Moken live as hunters and gatherers of the resources found on the land and in the sea. Moken ethnohistory asserts their ancestral ties to mainland SEA. According to these accounts,

Moken ancestors lived in settlements of the Myanmar–Malaya mainland and practiced agriculture, but were driven to the coast by the Burmese to the north and the Malays to the south, and subsequently settled in the Mergui Archipelago. Continuous raiding by pirates further forced the Moken to adopt a sea-based lifestyle to avoid capture.
People of Moken