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The Thai language (Thai: ภาษาไทย, transcription: phasa thai; IPA: [pʰaːsaːtʰaj]), is the national and official language of Thailand and the mother tongue of the Thai people, Thailand's dominant ethnic group. Thai is a member of the Tai group of the Tai-Kadai language family. The Tai-Kadai languages are thought to have originated in what is now southern China, and some linguists have proposed links to the Austroasiatic, Austronesian, or Sino-Tibetan language families. It is a tonal and analytic language. The combination of tonality, a complex orthography, relational markers and a distinctive phonology can make Thai difficult to learn for those who do not already speak a related language.
Languages and dialectsStandard Thai, also known as Central Thai or Siamese, is the official language of Thailand, spoken by about 65 million people (1990) including speakers of Bangkok Thai (although the latter is sometimes considered as a separate dialect). Khorat Thai is spoken by about 400,000 (1984) in Nakhon Ratchasima; it occupies a linguistic position somewhere between Central Thai and Isan on a dialect continuum, and may be considered a variant or dialect of either.
Statistics are from Ethnologue 2003-10-4. Many of these languages are spoken by larger numbers outside of Thailand. Most speakers of dialects and minority languages speak Central Thai as well, since it is the language used in schools and universities all across the kingdom. Standard Thai is composed of several distinct registers, forms for different social contexts:
ScriptThe Thai alphabet is derived from the Khmer alphabet (อักขระเขมร), which is modeled after the Brahmic script from the Indic family. Much like the Burmese adopted the Mon script (which also has Indic origins), the Thais adopted and modified Khmer script to create their own writing system. While the oldest known inscription in the Khmer language dates from 611 AD, inscriptions in Thai writing began to appear around 1292 AD. Notable features include:
The latter in particular causes problems for computer encoding and text rendering. TransliterationThere is no universal standard for transliterating Thai into English. For example, the name of King Rama IX, the present monarch, is transliterated variously as Bhumibol, Phumiphon, or many other versions. Guide books, text books and dictionaries may each follow different systems. For this reason, most language courses recommend that learners master the Thai alphabet. In scholarly usage, French scholars tend to romanize Thai with a letter-for-letter transcription according to the original Sanskrit value of the characters. Anglophone scholars generally prefer either a simplified phonetic rendering or some variation on the International Phonetic Alphabet. This article uses a simplified IPA system which does not indicate tone or vowel length. The Thai Royal Institute [1] publishes sets of rules for transliterating Thai words into the Roman alphabet and vice versa (the Royal Thai General System of Transcription), but these are far from universally applied. The ISO published an international standard for the transliteration of Thai into Roman script in September 2003 [2]. From Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, there is an online tool available which romanizes Thai texts according to the Royal Institute system, see [3]. GrammarFrom the perspective of linguistic typology, Thai can be considered to be an analytic language. The word order is Subject Verb Object, although the subject is often omitted. Thai pronominal system varies according to the sex and relative status of speaker and audience. AdjectivesAdjectives follow the noun. A duplicated adjective is used to mean "very" (with the first occurrence at a higher pitch) or "rather" (with both at the same pitch), e.g. คนอ้วนๆ (khon uan uan, IPA: [kʰon uan uan]) "a very/rather fat person." (Higbie 187-188) Comparatives take the form "A X กว่า B" (kwa, IPA: [kwaː]), A is more X than B. The superlative is expressed as "A X ที่สุด" (thisut, IPA: [tʰiːsut]), A is most X. VerbsVerbs do not inflect (i.e. do not change with person, tense, voice, mood or number) nor are there any participles. Duplication conveys the idea of doing the verb intensively. The passive voice is indicated by the insertion of ถูก (thuk, IPA: [tʰuːk])) before the verb. For example:
Tense is conveyed by tense markers before or after the verb: กำลัง (kamlang, IPA: [kamlaŋ]) before the verb for ongoing action (like English -ing form) or อยู่ (yu, IPA: [juː]) after the verb for the present; For example: Future can be indicated by จะ (cha, IPA: [tɕaʔ]) before the verb. For example:
Past can be indicated by ได้ (dai, IPA: [daːj]) before the verb (or by a time expression). However, แล้ว (laew, IPA: [lɛːw]) is more often used to indicate the past tense by being placed behind the verb. Or, both ได้ and แล้ว are put together to form the past tense expression, i.e. Subject + ได้ + Verb + แล้ว. For example:
AdverbsThere is no morphological distinction between adverbs and adjectives. Many words can be used in either function. Intensity can be expressed by a duplicated word. Adverbs usually follow the verb. NounsNouns are uninflected and have no gender; there are no plural forms or articles. Plurals are expressed by adding "nouns of multitude" (ลักษณนาม) or classifiers in the form of noun-number-classifier, e.g. "teacher five person" for "five teachers". While in English, such classifiers are usually absent ("four chairs") or optional ("two bottles of beer" or "two beers"), a classifier is almost always used in Thai (hence "chair four item" and "beer two bottle"). PronounsSubject pronouns are often omitted, while nicknames are often used where English would use a pronoun. There are specialised pronouns in the royal and sacred Thai languages. The following are appropriate for conversational use:
พวก phuak [pʰûak] can be used as a prefix to make other words plural e.g. phuak-phom พวกผม (we, masculine) ParticlesThe particles are often untranslatable words added to the end of a sentence to indicate respect, a request, encouragement or other moods (similar to the use of intonation in English), as well as varying the level of formality. They are not used in written Thai. The most common particles indicating respect are ครับ (khrap, IPA [kʰrap] with a high tone) for a man, and ค่ะ (kha, IPA [kʰa]with a falling tone) for a woman; these can also be used to indicate an affirmative. Other common particles are:
PhonologyTonesThere are five phonemic tones: middle, low, high, rising and falling. The table shows an example of both the phonemic tones and their phonetic realization, in the IPA.
Tones are indicated in the written script by a combination of the class of the initial consonant (high, mid or low), vowel length (long or short), closing consonant (unvoiced/plosive or voiced/sonorant) and sometimes one of four tone marks. The tonal rules are shown in the following chart:
The letters ห (high class) and sometimes อ (mid class) are used as silent letters before another consonant to produce the correct tone. In polysyllabic words, an initial high class consonant with an implicit vowel renders the following syllable also high class. There are a few exceptions to this system, notably the pronouns chan and khao, which are both pronounced with a high tone rather than the rising tone indicated by the script (in an informal conversation; generally when these words are recited or read in public, they are pronounced in rising tone). ConsonantsThai distinguishes among three voice/aspiration patterns for plosive consonants:
Where English has only a distinction between the voiced, unaspirated /b/ and the unvoiced, aspirated /p/, Thai distinguishes a third sound which is neither voiced nor aspirated, which occurs in English only as an allophone of /p/, approximately the sound of the p in "spin." There is similarly an alveolar /t/, /tʰ/, /d/ triplet. In the velar series there is a /k/, /kʰ/ pair and in the postalveolar series the /tɕ/, /tɕʰ/ pair. In each cell below, the first line indicates International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the second indicates the Thai characters in initial position (more letters appearing in the same box have identical pronunciation).
VowelsThe basic vowels of the Thai language, from front to back and close to open, are given in the following table. The top entry in every cell is the symbol from the International phonetic alphabet, the second entry gives the spelling in the Thai alphabet, where a dash (–) indicates the position of the initial consonant after which the vowel is pronounced. A second dash indicates that a final consonant must follow.
The vowels each exist in long-short pairs: these are distinct phonemes forming unrelated words in Thai, but usually transliterated the same: เขา (khao) means he or she, while ขาว (khao) means white. The long-short pairs are as follows:
The basic vowels can be combined into diphthongs as follows:
Additionally, there are three triphthongs, all of which are long:
For a guide to written vowels, see the Thai alphabet page. VocabularyOther than compound words and words of foreign origin, most words are monosyllabic. Historically, words have most often been borrowed from Sanskrit and Pāli; Buddhist terminology is particularly indebted to these. Old Khmer has also contributed its share, especially in regard to royal court terminology. Since the beginning of the 20th century, however, the English language has had the greatest influence. Also, many Teochew Chinese words are used, some replacing existing Thai words. Thailand also uses the distinctive Thai six hour clock in addition to the 24 hour clock. References
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