About Thai

by Pisith Phlong

Number of speakers
Thai is the official language of the Kingdom of Thailand. An estimated 60 million people speak Thai in Thailand. (Strazny, p. 1098)

Language group
Of the many languages and dialects spoken in Thailand, Thai is spoken by the largest number of people. It belongs to the southwestern subgroup of the Tai language family. It is very closely related to Lao which shares the same language family group. (Brown , Vol. 12, p. 481)

History of written language and script
Thai is a member of Tai language family originating from Guizhou and Guangxi area in the Southern China. It began to move southward about 2,000 years ago, after the Han Chinese moved into the southern China provinces. The Tai speaking group split into a number of small groups, traveled northwestward as far as Assam, and further south into present day Northern Thailand and Laos and the Mekong River region, where the Mon-Khmer speaking community had settled some 4,000 years ago. At about the 13th century, the Thai formed their first kingdom, Sukhothai, and recorded their first writing in 1292 A.D., during the King Ramkhamhaeng period. During the 14th century, the Thai continued further south and formed a new Kingdom at Ayutthaya (1350 – 1767 A.D.) and adopted more words from other languages such as Sanskrit, Pali, and Khmer. (Iwasaki and Ingkaphirom, p. 2; Jumsai, p. 96; Herbert, p. 23)

Language
As a member of the Tai language family, Thai is a noninflected tonal language, and words are usually monosyllables. (Brown, Vol. 12, p. 481) A number of polysyllable words were borrowed from Sanskrit, Pali and Khmer during the Ayutthaya period (14th to 18th century) and recently more words from English and Chinese (Teochiu). (Frawley, p. 239; Brown, Vol. 12, p. 642) The writing system adapted its sound system by putting tonal splits among syllables. The Thai language has five tones, mid, low, falling, high and rising, where changing tones results in changing the meaning of a word. (Strazny, p. 1099) Similar to other Southeast Asian languages, such as Khmer, Lao, Malay and Javanese, Thai is a hierarchical speech level language where the selection of terms and personal pronouns is important regarding age, sex, relationship, situation and status between speakers and persons whom they address. (Brown, Vol. 12, p. 643; Strazny, p. 1100) Three main language classifications are noted in Thai, royal language, monk language and lay language. (Herbert, p. 25)

Scripts
The earliest Thai writing dates back to 1292 A.D during the King Ramkhamhaeng reign (1275-1317 A.D) of the Sukhothai period. This early writing employed Khmer scripts which were derived from Indian ones. At this early developing stage of writing, vowels were written on the same line like consonants, but in the mid 14th century vowels began to be placed above, below, before or after the consonants, similar to the Khmer and more or less like the present Thai. More consonants and vowels were added into its writing system in the 17th century and two more tonal marks were added in addition to the existing two tonal marks from the Ramkhamhaeng period. (Iwasaki and Ingkaphirom, p.3) In the present, the Thai writing system is written from left to right without space between each word and based on the combination of 44 consonants, at least 28 vowels and 4 tonal marks. (ibid, p. 7, 23)

There were many kinds of written material used for writing Thai in the past. Inscriptions were commonly used for records during the Sukhothai period in various poetic forms. During the Ayutthaya period, manuscripts and folding books were often used for records of religious texts and other subjects ranging from astrology, cosmology, massage technique and folklore stories in forms of verse and prose with influences from Buddhism. (Herbert, p. 29-33) Besides the Thai script, there were three other scripts in use during the old Thai periods: 1) Khom (old Khmer), similar to the Mul script of Khmer, and used for writing Pali on palm leaf manuscripts and folding books; 2) Tham, used for Pali script writing; 3) Lanna script, the former script of the Lanna Kingdom in Northern Thailand, based in Chiang Mai. (Herbert, p. 28)

Other Dialects
The majority of population of Thailand, accountable for about 92% of the total population, speaks Thai, but there are variations of speech and pronunciation in different regions. Thai is geographically classified into four regional dialects: 1) the Central Thai dialect, including the language spoken in Bangkok, spoken by about 20 to 25 million people. It is also considered to be the standard language of Thailand. 2) the Northeastern Thai dialect (Isan or Lao), spoken by about 23 million people; 3) the Northern Thai dialect (Kam Muang or Lanna), spoken by about 6 million people; 4) the Southern Thai dialect (Paktai), spoken by about 5 million people. (Iwasaki and Ingkaphirom, p. 1; Strazny, p. 1098; Brown, Vol. 12, p. 643) Besides Thai, which is a member of Tai language family, there are a number of other languages belonging to four other language families: 1) Austo-Asiatic, spoken by about 4.3% of the total population; 2) Sino-Tibetan, spoken by 3.1% of population, including seven Chinese dialects mainly spoken in towns, and another 14 Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in north and northwest Thailand; 3) Hmong-Mien, spoken mainly in the north of Thailand by about 0.3% of the population; 4) Austronesian, spoken in southern Thailand by 0.3% of the total population, including the three major languages of Malay, Moklen and Urak Lawoi. (Brown, Vol. 12, p. 643)

Comparison to Western languages
Thai is a hierarchical language, and the choice of words is important to express status and relationship of speakers. (Herbert, p. 25) It is a tonal language with Subject-Verb-Object sentence structure. There is no inflection between noun and adjective, or pronoun and verb in terms of number and gender, and usually the adjective is preceded by the noun in its noun phrase. Words are usually formed by adding a prefix, infix or suffix. (Brown , Vol. 12, p. 481; Iwasaki and Ingkaphirom, p. 32)

References

• Brown, K. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Volume 12. (2nd ed.). Elsevier: Oxford, 2006.
• Frawley, W. J. International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Vol. 4. (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press: New York, 2003.
• Herbert, P. and Milner, A. Southeast Asia, Languages and Literatures. University of Hawaii Press: Honolulu, 1989.
• Iwasaki, S. and Ingkaphirom, P. A Reference Grammar of Thai. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2005.
• Jumsai M. M. L., History of Thai Literature. (3rd revised ed.) Chalermnit: Bangkok, 2000.
• Strazny, P. Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Vol. 2. Fitzroy Dearborn: New York, 2005.