O1 is found at high frequencies amongst males native to Southeast Asia, Taiwan, the Japanese Archipelago, the Korean Peninsula, Madagascar and some populations in southern China and Austroasiatic speakers of India.

O2 is found at high levels amongst Han Chinese, Tibeto-Burman populations (including many of those in Yunnan, Tibet, Burma, Northeast India, and Nepal), Manchu, Mongols (especially those who are citizens of the PRC), Koreans, Vietnamese, Filipinos, Japanese, Thais, Polynesians, Miao people, Hmong, the Naiman tribe of Kazakhs in Kazakhstan,[5] Kazakhs in the southeast of Altai Republic,[6] and Kazakhs in the Ili area of Xinjiang.

An association with the spread of Austronesian languages in late antiquity is suggested by significant levels of O-M175 among island populations of the South Pacific and Indian Ocean, including the East African littoral.

For example, Haplogroup O-M50 has even been found in Bantu-speaking populations of the Comoros along 6% of O-MSY2.2(xM50),[13] while both O-M50 and O-M95(xM88) occur commonly among the Malagasy people of Madagascar with a combined frequency of 34%.

[20] In the Iranic population, it is found in Iranian (Esfahan) at 6.3% (Wells et al. 2001), 8.9% of Tajiks in Afghanistan[21] 4.2% in the Pathans in Pakistan (Firasat 2007) but 1% in Afghanistan,[citation needed] 3.1% in Burusho (Firasat 2007).

Haplogroup O-M175 ranges in various moderate to high frequencies in the ethnic minorities of South Africa.

[23] Haplogroup O-M175 had also been found in Latin America and Caribbean as a result of massive Chinese male migration from the 19th century.

O3-M122 was absent in the Sayyid (Syed) population and appeared in low numbers among Tanolis, Gujars and Yousafzais.

In another test the East Asian paternal Y Haplogroup O made up 58% of Russian males samples in China.

[39] A broad survey of Y-chromosome variation among populations of central Eurasia found haplogroup O-M175(xM119,M95,M122) in 31% (14/45) of a sample of Koreans and in smaller percentages of Crimean Tatars (1/22 = 4.5%), Tajiks (1/16 = 6.25% Dushanbe, 1/40 = 2.5% Samarkand), Uyghurs (2/41 = 4.9%), Uzbeks (1/68 = 1.5% Surxondaryo, 1/70 = 1.4% Xorazm), and Kazakhs (1/54 = 1.9%) (Wells et al. 2001).

However, nearly all of the purported Korean O-M175(xM119,M95,M122) Y-chromosomes may belong to Haplogroup O-M176,[Note 1] and later studies do not support the finding of O-M175* among similar population samples (Xue 2006, Kim 2011).

The following is a phylogenetic tree of language families and their corresponding SNP markers, or haplogroups, sourced mainly from Edmondson 2007 and Shi 2005.

Sinitic O2a2b1a2 (F114) Sino-Tibetan O2a2b1a1 (M117) Hmong (Miao) She (Ratliff 1998) Mien (Yao) Munda Mon–Khmer Formosan Malayo-Polynesian Kadai[Note 2] Kam–Sui Tai Prior to 2002, there were in academic literature at least seven naming systems for the Y-Chromosome Phylogenetic tree.

This allows a researcher reviewing older published literature to quickly move between nomenclatures.