of the 12 Cultural Mandates, of June 24, 1939, renamed Siam ‘Thailand’, or as it was during the Second World War, the ‘Great Thai Empire’, an assertion of Thai imperial identity over subject peoples. Then, in 1943, the influential National Culture Commission, which has survived in various incarnations until the present day (as the Thai Ministry of Culture) was established in order to define and disseminate official Thai national culture. Post-war era Thailand received an influx of tens of thousands of Vietnamese after the end of the French Indochina war. During the Cold War, further nation-building resulted in a polity where 'Thai' and 'Tai' continued to be deliberately conflated and, in the official discourse, nearly everyone was ethnically Thai and so spoke Thai or Thai ‘dialects’, as the regional languages and most smaller Tai languages were described. From the 1960s, census data described up to 99% of the population as ethnically Thai. Nonetheless, academic research of the Cold War period suggests that of these, only 33% spoke Central Thai, with over 50% speaking Lao dialects (Isan), an indication of the number of ethnic Lao or users of Lao as a second language or lingua franca for the Northeast. Thai censuses still do not disaggregate by either the largest or smallest ethnic groups and so reflect Thai national identity rather than the scientific consensus. Thailand saw an influx of a large number of Northern Khmer during the rule of the Khmer Rouge, some of whom permanently settled with indigenous Khmer. Official and academic position According to the Royal Thai Government's 2011 Country Report to the UN committee responsible for the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, available from the Department of Rights and Liberties Promotion of the Thai Ministry of Justice, 62 ethnolinguistic communities are officially recognised in Thailand. However, of these, only 56 were listed in the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security's 2015 Master Plan for the Development of Ethnic Groups in Thailand 2015-2017, with the larger, ethnoregional ethnic communities, including the Central Thai, being omitted; it, therefore, covers only 9.7% of the population. Twenty million Central Thai (together with approximately 650,000 Khorat Thai) made up approximately 20,650,000 (34.1 percent) of the nation's population of 60,544,937 at the time of completion of the Mahidol University Ethnolinguistic Maps of Thailand data (1997), which provides population numbers for most ethnolinguistic minorities. The 2011 Thailand Country