Thai / ภาษาไทย

History and Evolution

Thai, the official national language of Thailand, is a member of the Tak-Kadai linguistic family, having originated in the area that today is the border region of Vietnam and China. It is also known as Siamese or Central Thai. The earliest evidence of a distinctive written Thai language dates to 1283 CE, during the reign of Ramkhamhaeng, the Sukhothai period king, and the writing system has changed little since then. Ancient texts are easily read and understood by contemporary scholars. The Thai alphabet is in part based on Pali, Sanskrit, and Indian characters.

Thai is actually composed of at least five different registers (not to be confused with dialects), each one corresponding to a different social context. For example, “street” or common Thai is spoken among family members and friends; formal Thai includes respectful terms of address and is used in politics and journalism; rhetorical Thai is used in public speaking; religious Thai is used when discussing Buddhism or addressing monks; and Royal Thai is used when addressing or referring to members of the royal family.

Geographic Distribution

Some form of Thai is spoken by approximately 80 percent of the 67 million residents of Thailand, although Standard Thai is the primary language of some 20 million people, primarily the educated classes in the central region around the capital, Bangkok.

There are four widely spoken dialects, roughly corresponding to the four geographic regions of the country. In central Thailand and the northeast, the dialect is primarily Standard Thai, very similar to the Lao language. Standard Thai is the dialect taught in schools and used in most television broadcasting. The southern dialect is related to Malay, while the southeastern dialect is closely related to Khmer. The Karen language is spoken in the eastern borderlands. The dialects are generally mutually intelligible, although there are vocabulary words unique to each dialect.

Prominence in Society

Thai is the language of government, education, business, and the media in Thailand.

Unique Characteristics

Thai uses a phonemic alphabet of 44 consonants and 15 vowels, which are assembled into 32 vowel combinations.

Syllables are pronounced in one of five lexical tones: mid, high, low, rising, or falling. This variation creates pleasing melodic patterns that lend the language a sing-song quality.

The Thai alphabet, not unlike English, is phonemic, so pronunciation of a word generally follows the spelling of the word.

As a tonal language, each word has a pitch characteristic that must be spoken correctly to be correctly understood.

Thai words are not conjugated for tense, person, possession, number, gender, or subject-verb agreement; these distinctions are either conveyed through context or left unspecified.

While there are no verb tenses, Thai is acutely sensitive to aspect—how an event progresses or unfolds over time. For example, ฉันหิว (chan hiu) means “I am hungry,” while ฉันจะหิว (chan cha hiu) means “I am later hungry” and ฉันกำลังหิว (chan kamlang hiu) means “I am right now hungry.”

Loanwords in English

The popularity of Thai cuisine in the English-speaking world has brought numerous Thai culinary terms into wide usage. Beyond popular menu items, few words in English are drawn directly from Thai; however, numerous Thai words that have their origins in Sanskrit and Southeast Asian languages have gained widespread use in English.

• jasmine (ญาสุมิน; a genus of fragrant shrubs of the olive family)
• sarong (โสร่ง; a long piece of cloth wrapped around the body as a garment)
• tuk-tuk (ตุ๊ก-ตุ๊ก; a motorized rickshaw, typically with three wheels)
• typhoon (ไต้ฝุ่น; a tropical cyclone, similar to a hurricane)
• bong (บ้อง; a bamboo pipe filled with water used for smoking cannabis)
• ganga or gangah (กัญชา; marijuana)

Say Whaaat?

Because Thai has no articles (such as “a,” “an,” or “the”), the Thai language does not lend itself to definiteness. As a result, Thai speakers tend to make frequent use of puns and double-entendres.

Since there is no universally-accepted method for transcribing Thai into the Latin alphabet, Thai language learners are encouraged to master the Thai script.

There are numerous subtleties and intricacies of register in the Thai language, making it difficult for Thai learners to differentiate between “street” or common Thai and the other forms, such as royal, religious, and rhetorical. Mistakes, however, are treated lightly if the speaker is a foreigner struggling to learn or speak the language.

Because there are no plurals for nouns, a word is simply repeated to indicate more than one. For example, the word for “child” is  เด็ก (dek) while the word for “children” is เด็ก ๆ (dek-dek).

Writer: Bruce Falstein