Looking at south east asian culture groups

[AirikrStrife]

South East Asias was forgotten when the redfinition of cultures happen a few DLCs ago. Now looking at a new east asia expansion it could be a good idea to revisit the area. The Culture groups as follows:

Burman: Tibetan, Yi, Bai, Burmese, Karen, Kachin, Chin
Essentially the "Tibeto-Burman" approach of grouping the transhimalayan language family into a Sinitic vs the rest divsion. Based on language and all of them distantly related (comparable would be a whole indo-european culture group)

Thai: Fairly decent group with all cultures geographically coherent and linguistically very close.

Malay: One language in the area I'm concerned about, Cham

Mon-Khmer: Based on the very diverse language family including Viet, Khmer and Mon. It wasn't until fairly recently linguists figured out Vietnamese wasn't a part of the transhimalayan language family but rather the mon-khmer family. Therefor ordinary speakers of Khmer or Mon wouldn't recognize any special kinship inbetween themselves closer to that of other surrounding cultures.

The Thai family is functional. But the Burman and Mon-Khmer are not very functional. There are many alternative ways to structure the families. Without adding new cultures or increase the number culture groups, an outline could be:

Tibetan:
Tibetan
Bai
Yi
(possibly Miao)

Burman:
The remaining Burman cultures + Mon

Indochinese:
Thai culture + Vietnamese and Khmer (and possibly Cham)

Or:

Tibetan goes to the mongol group to represent the relationship between Mongols and Tibetans over the euiv timelines including mongolian migration and assimiliation in Tibet, spread of tibetan culture among mongols and the creation of the Koshun Khanate. Bai and Yo would thus stay in Burman group

 

[MilkAndLettuce]

The Southeast Asian culture groups always struck me as being oddly set up, and with the recent changes to culture groups they're even more weird now. I like playing in the region, so I hope they look into rearranging things in the next patch.

Anyway, I also went ahead and made an image to illustrate your proposed culture changes since I like them and it seems that's the best way to get things noticed around here:

 

[Semi-Lobster]

As you know this area of the world is.... tricky, there is a great amount of political, ethnocentric and imperialistic connotations to everything, and many can get offended by a lot of things...

Cham are definitely the odd man out, as they should be. They were, and saw themselves, as a Malay people based from the sea, and like other Malay peoples, they converted to Islam as well.

At first I'll be honest with you, I wasn't a big fan of the map at first, but thinking more there are some interesting ideas in it. Dai Viet afterall has it's own large Tai population to deal with. It also represents the tug of war between Siamese, Lan Xang and Vietnamese influence over the Khmer. On the other hand though it also kills the focus and importance of the even closer relationship and between the Thai peoples (we afterall have, Central, Northern, Laotian, and Shan (and Zhuang, through the Laos-Northern Vietnam-Guangxi continuum) as separate in the game). There is a lot in favour of the existing tree and your proposed one. As for Mon, I think it should stay where it is just to demonstrate their 'differentness' with the Burmese and Thai influence, especially the repeated rebellions against Toungoo and the very EU4esque revival of Hanthawaddy (Pegu) nearly 200 years after it's original demise. Lastly Martaban REALLY needs to be Mon, it's just simple as that, I know it's supposed to represent Kayin state but in terms of the EU4 timeline and the coastal control the Mon had, I would say the Mon have a bigger importance in the wonky EU4 province.

Burmese and Tibetan family are good as far as current in-game distribution goes but I REALLY don't like the Ahom Kingdom (aka Assam) as being part of the "East Aryan" group. While eventually by the 17th century Assamese overtook Tai Ahom as the primary language of the kingdom but even today Upper Assam (eastern Assam) is predominately ethnic Ahom or other East Asians assimilated into the Ahom. Sutiya is in a similar situation where it should be a Burmese language, once again Assamese not becoming predominate until centuries into the game. "East Aryan" do not really represent what these two states were culturally. Also why not just make Meghalaya a province? Nothing happened there in EU4's timeline but you have to admit, the Burmese invasion of 1824 demonstrates that nobody thought the terrain of the area was 'impassable', but that's more of a minor gripe.

Lastly for (going north), Dehong should be part of Mong Yang (aka Mong Mao), it's actually supposed to be it's capital!

 

[SantoshKashyap]

To add further, even within Eastern Aryan Group, The culture, language, food etc. of Bihar, Puvanchal, Awadh are more in common than Bengali. Bengali has a different calendar, even their festivals and their writing script is different. So is Nepali. Nepali should definitely not be kept in Bengali culture group.

There should be a separate cultural group between Bengal and Delhi.

I had also once written about including Braj Culture in the map. It is not represented in the game.

Braj-Awadhi-Purvanchal (Bhojpuri)-Bihari (Maithili)-Nepali (Maithili - North Bihar (especially Tirhut & South Nepal region, The Trai) can be a separate group. It should also be noted that this entire was going through strong Bhakti-Movement in EU4 era. Many literary works written in Braj, Awadhi & Maithili originated from these regions in 16th-18th century.

They have more or less in common and are too apart from Bengali.

 

[SantoshKashyap]

Ladhakhis are often called Bhotias.

Make Bhoti a separate culture for Ladakh & Nagari and group it under Tibetan culture group.

 

[AirikrStrife]

As you know this area of the world is.... tricky, there is a great amount of political, ethnocentric and imperialistic connotations to everything, and many can get offended by a lot of things...

Cham are definitely the odd man out, as they should be. They were, and saw themselves, as a Malay people based from the sea, and like other Malay peoples, they converted to Islam as well.

At first I'll be honest with you, I wasn't a big fan of the map at first, but thinking more there are some interesting ideas in it. Dai Viet afterall has it's own large Tai population to deal with. It also represents the tug of war between Siamese, Lan Xang and Vietnamese influence over the Khmer. On the other hand though it also kills the focus and importance of the even closer relationship and between the Thai peoples (we afterall have, Central, Northern, Laotian, and Shan (and Zhuang, through the Laos-Northern Vietnam-Guangxi continuum) as separate in the game). There is a lot in favour of the existing tree and your proposed one. As for Mon, I think it should stay where it is just to demonstrate their 'differentness' with the Burmese and Thai influence, especially the repeated rebellions against Toungoo and the very EU4esque revival of Hanthawaddy (Pegu) nearly 200 years after it's original demise. Lastly Martaban REALLY needs to be Mon, it's just simple as that, I know it's supposed to represent Kayin state but in terms of the EU4 timeline and the coastal control the Mon had, I would say the Mon have a bigger importance in the wonky EU4 province.

Burmese and Tibetan family are good as far as current in-game distribution goes but I REALLY don't like the Ahom Kingdom (aka Assam) as being part of the "East Aryan" group. While eventually by the 17th century Assamese overtook Tai Ahom as the primary language of the kingdom but even today Upper Assam (eastern Assam) is predominately ethnic Ahom or other East Asians assimilated into the Ahom. Sutiya is in a similar situation where it should be a Burmese language, once again Assamese not becoming predominate until centuries into the game. "East Aryan" do not really represent what these two states were culturally. Also why not just make Meghalaya a province? Nothing happened there in EU4's timeline but you have to admit, the Burmese invasion of 1824 demonstrates that nobody thought the terrain of the area was 'impassable', but that's more of a minor gripe.

Lastly for (going north), Dehong should be part of Mong Yang (aka Mong Mao), it's actually supposed to be it's capital!

Yeah, it's hard deciding "what is a culture" devs have the same problem and their is a lot of weird and awekward solutions to culture groupings in the game. I made a suggestion on double culture groups a long time ago: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/double-culture-groups.921966/
Would be able to solve some of those problems.

I've been thinking about the Ahom kingdom and Sutiya but the only sources I have had is wikipedia and the wikipedia articles on those kingdoms is not good enough to make an informed suggestion.

Megahayana and Arunachdel cold very well be open provinces. Parts of Arunachal were under tibetan or sutiyan influence/control.

While on the topic of southeastern india, Sikkim should be it's own province, and possibly also splitting the rest of Bhutan into two. Could be a way of creating it's own Tibetan culture group with Bothi/Ladakh, and Dzongkha.

Also if I don't misremember Nepal didn't even exist and there should be a Newar state in eastern nepal.

Essentially a lot that could be done in the indo-china border zone.

 

[SantoshKashyap]

Assam in making:

 

[Trin Tragula]

Also if I don't misremember Nepal didn't even exist and there should be a Newar state in eastern nepal

I suggest you check up on the meaning of some of the Nepalese province names to get an idea of the average kingdom size in Nepal

As for India in general I strongly recommend using this to help: http://dsal.uchicago.edu/reference/schwartzberg/toc.html?issue=

 

[Trin Tragula]

There's definately more tags that could be split from the existing ones in India but that is a separate topic and I'd appreciate it if map change discussions could be kept separate from revamp of South East Asian culture groups
As always we read everything but keeping on topic makes it much likelier that we'll actually find the right discussion if we want to have a look at it at a later date when something is actually being revamped (and as always I will make no such promises today ).

Assam in making:

View attachment 246084

And in case it's not clear to everyone in the thread in EU4 these tags correspond to the kingdoms of this picture:

Ahom-> Assam (also comes to include Koch Hajo in later starts due to close dependency between the two)
Kamata and later Koch Bihar -> Koch
Chutiya->Sadiya
Kacharis-> Kachar

 

[Semi-Lobster]

Yes, sorry for going a bit off topic, I just wanted to get some culture issues relating to South East Asia In the in-game "Indian super region" particularly in Assam, where ethnically the Ahom and Sadiya kingdoms were still dominated by those specific cultures.

 

[AirikrStrife]

As you know this area of the world is.... tricky, there is a great amount of political, ethnocentric and imperialistic connotations to everything, and many can get offended by a lot of things...

Yes, it's a lot like balkan with Mon-Khmer being like albanian-greek-romanian. It's hard placing them anywhere, but just like albanian end up with soth slavic and romanian with carpathian there are other solutions which are fairly logical.

I don't know if one should keep staring too much at riots and wars. . . after all I'm from an area which were practically ethnicly cleansed 400 years ago despite the population speaking an almost identical language to that of the conquering nation (Skåne was conquered from denmark, by sweden in 1658)

Another bit of a difficult grouping is the northern branch of Burman, Bai and Yi should definitly stick together but their placing between southern burman and tibetan seems pretty arbitary to me, perhaps someone with better knowledge of the region would now (I don't really know that much about the region to begin with but thought it worth bringing up for the next expansion)

Looking at the proposal(?) from someone there could be an independent tibetan culture as that represents one of the most isolated groups in the region. Possibly Tibetan split into a handfull of smaller cultures like (Central) Tibetan, Kham, Amdo, Bothi, Dzonghka in case they're willing on adding a few more provinces in the region. I wanted to make a suggestion about Tibet, but can't find a good book on the subject and wikipedia hasn't been really adequate on the subject either I think.

 

[Pełpeł]

I suggest you check up on the meaning of some of the Nepalese province names to get an idea of the average kingdom size in Nepal

As for India in general I strongly recommend using this to help: http://dsal.uchicago.edu/reference/schwartzberg/toc.html?issue=

Made me smile

Is it mandala level of fracturing? I fully understand, that it is just impossible to depict everything, but still India and SEA should get some mechanics to show how hellishly decentralized and fractured nations in those regions were. Some instances like Cham Pa or Hanthawaddy (Pegu) could be resolved by custom factions (Cham Pa showing their kingdoms and Hanthawaddy showing their autonomous vassals).

But Java, Sumatra, Borneo? They were bloody mess. Moreover political thinking was so abstract compared to other systems, that for Europeans it was easier to rule them in mandala style (Netherlands and GB (at the start)) than teaching them Feudal thinking (it was unexistant and abstract concept).

 

[Lantis]

Being from Assam myself. I want more events or decisions for Assam. God damn, We even trolled the Mughal Empire badly....and a Bengali Renaissance event too.....