The Races and Peoples of

South-east Asia
by BERTIL LUNDMAN*
I
Now we move to a region with usually abundant summer
rains. This fact has favored the cultural development of the area
to a high degree. It is probably more meaningful to divide the
area into two sub-regions: the mainland, except the Malacca
peninsula, on the one sideand the remaining region up to the
border of Oceania, above all, New Guinea.
The linguistic distribution is on the whole rather simple. One
exception is the linguistic affinity of some of the still almost
unexplored smaller tribal groups in the interior of Indo-China.
Farthest to the northeast we have three languages, each of which
stands by itself: the Ainu, the Japanese, and the Korean. The
great Sino-Tibetan language family today dominates almost the
entire mainland, apart from certain areas in Indo-China. There
some scattered languages of the Austro-Asiatic language family
are spoken. These languages, however, are now being displaced
by languages of the Sino-Tibetan family. In Indonesia languages
of the Austronesian language family are exclusively in use. Only
on the easternmost islands, above all on the Moluccas, are
languages spoken which are isolated or possibly related to the
West Papuan languages.
II
Different types of the hypsicephalic or high-skulled SoutheastMongolid racial group are encountered everywhere in Japan
(excluding the Ainu), Korea and China, and also in the larger
parts of Indo-China and Indonesia. In Indonesia, however, they
are mixed in places with older, more primitive races. The highheadedness of the Chinese in contrast to the peoples of Central
Asia was well-known to them since ancient times!
The Japanese language is considered by some students to be
related to the Tungusic as well as to the Korean languages.
However, the relationship is not firm to either of these two
languages. Perhaps Japanese, and also Korean, is a form of
polished, hybrid language. Anthropologically, the Japanese most
resemble the South Chinese. In the best rice-growing regions
the Japanese are predominantly South Chinese or Malaid (the
* Translated from the German by Donald A. Swan.

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