Thailand Language

Like the people themselves, the Thai language has absorbed influences over time from languages including English, Chinese, and Sanskrit while still retaining its distinctive characteristics. Thai is a tonal language and consists of five tones—mid, low, high, rising, and falling—which define a word just as much as its script does. The first Thai alphabet was created by King Ramkhamhaeng of Sukhothai in 1283 and was based on Mon and Khmer script, and it has survived almost entirely intact to this day. Thai grammar is delightfully simple: there are no suffixes, genders, articles, declensions, or plurals in spoken Thai. Like English, it is written from left to right, but it lacks capital letters and punctuation. Thanks to its grammatical simplicity, Thai vocabulary readily lends itself to adaptation, especially in the creation of compound words to describe objects. For example, the word “ice” in Thai, nam khaeng , literally translates to “solid water.” Western concepts and scientific and technological terms are somewhat more difficult to create by combining existing Thai words. To remedy the situation, the Royal Institute convenes a committee of linguists to concoct new vocabulary words by delving into Pali and Sanskrit. The national language has four major dialects that have developed in northern, northeastern, southern, and central Thailand. Central Thai (also known as Bangkok Thai) is the standard dialect and is taught in schools (see Appendix for specific phrases). In addition to regional dialects, Thai also has four different categories of vocabulary and syntax whose use depends on the social status of the speaker relative to his audience. The most distinctive of these is the royal language, rachasap , used mainly for state or official occasions. Following rachasap are the dialect used to address religious figures, the polite vernacular , used on a daily basis, and the slang of casual conversation.