Orang Laut
several seafaring ethnic groups and tribes living around Singapore, peninsular Malaysia and the Indonesian Riau Islands
The Orang Laut (also known as the Orang Suku Laut) are several seafaring ethnic groups and tribes living around Singapore, Peninsular Malaysia and the Indonesian Riau Islands. The Orang Laut are commonly identified as the Orang Seletar (also known as Orang Selat) from the Straits of Johor. The term may also refer to any Malayic-speaking people living on coastal islands, including those of the Mergui Archipelago in Myanmar and Thailand, commonly known as Moken, sometimes even extended to Sama-Bajau.
The population of the tribe in the 21st century is estimated to be 420,000 people.
Etymology
The Malay term orang laut literally means 'sea peoples'. The Orang Laut live and travel in their boats on the sea. They made their living from fishing, foraging and trading sea products. Another Malay term for them, Orang Selat (literally 'Straits people'), was brought into European languages as Celates or Selates.
Distribution
Broadly speaking, the term encompasses the numerous suku tribes and groups forming a maritime territory or Alam Melayu inhabiting the islands and estuaries in the Ria Archipelago, the Pulau Tujuh Islands, the Batam Archipelago, and the coasts and offshore islands of eastern Sumatra, the southern Malay Peninsula and Singapore.
History
The earliest description of the Orang Laut may have been by the 14th century Chinese traveler Wang Dayuan who described the inhabitants of Temasek (present day Singapore) in his work Daoyi Zhilüe..
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Orang Laut” is several seafaring ethnic groups and tribes living around Singapore, peninsular Malaysia and the Indonesian Riau Islands. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Orang, Laut and several, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q588870. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Orang Laut” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.