- Official language in
- Thailand
- Script
- Thai
Where it's spoken
Thai is the official language of Thailand: it is used in conducting official business and legal matters, and it is the medium of instruction in government schools throughout the country. According to Thailand's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, more than 92% of the population speaks Thai or one of its regional dialects. The standard variety is Standard, or Bangkok, Thai — the dialect taught in schools, heard on television, used by most Thais when talking with people who do not share their own regional dialect, and also the dialect taught to foreign learners of Thai.
Sources
- Potisuk, Siripong (2009). "A Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar for Thai." Proceedings of PACLIC 23 (ACL Anthology Y09-2002) — §2 "An Overview of Standard Thai"
- Bilmes, Leela (2001). "Sociolinguistic Aspects of Thai Politeness." PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley — Ch. 3, Methodology (Standard or Bangkok Thai)
- Thailand International Cooperation Agency (TICA), Royal Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs — "About Thailand" — Population and language
Script & pronunciation
Thai is written in its own script. As in most scripts descended from Brahmi, each consonant letter represents a syllable with an inherent vowel sound, which is then modified by vowel signs and tone marks attached to the consonant — some rendered as diacritics above or below it, others as separate letter-shaped signs placed before, after, or around it. Thai is the official script of Thailand, just as Lao is of Laos. Thai words are not separated by spaces; spacing is instead used where Western typography would use a comma or a period. The consonant's class, together with tone marks, indicates a syllable's tone. This app's phrase cards mark each syllable's tone with diacritics over the vowel, as in Nùeng ('one') and Sàwàtdi ('hello').
Sources
Grammar essentials
Thai word order is subject–verb–object, the pattern linguists consider most typical for Thai sentences. With the exception of loanwords, Thai words take no inflectional endings; grammatical ideas are expressed with separate words rather than by changing a word's form. Negation is formed by placing the word ไม่ (mâi) directly before the verb, as in ไม่ใช่ (mâi châi, "no/not correct") or ไม่เข้าใจ (mâi khâo jai, "don't understand"). In the noun phrase, adjectives and other modifiers come after the noun rather than before it, so "small child" is เด็กเล็ก (dèk lék) — literally "child small." A classifier word occurs with a noun when a number is present, as in the noun-number-classifier pattern จานแบ่งสองใบ ("two small plates").
Sources
- Potisuk, Siripong (2009). "A Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar for Thai." Proceedings of PACLIC 23 (ACL Anthology Y09-2002) — §2 "An Overview of Standard Thai" (SVO word order; no affixes except in loanwords)
- Chaiphet, Khanin (2023). "The Structure of Discontinuous Noun Phrases in Thai: Right-dislocation and Quantifier Float." PhD dissertation, Stony Brook University — Glossed negation example; postnominal modifiers in the noun phrase
- Hiranburana, Samang (1979). "A Classification of Thai Classifiers." Pacific Linguistics C-49:39-54, The Australian National University — Definition of a classifier
Politeness & etiquette
Spoken Thai uses polite status particles at the end of a sentence: the masculine ครับ (khráp) and the feminine ค่ะ (khâ). The tone of this particle depends on whether the sentence is a statement or a question: this app's cards use ค่ะ (khâ) in statements and คะ (khá) in questions, as in อะไรคะ (Àrai khá, "What?"). ผม (phǒm), the male "I," is described as "polite but status-neutral"; ฉัน (chǎn) is described as more commonly used by women. The wai — pressing the palms together while bowing or dipping the head — is described as the most common greeting used by people in Thailand.
Sources
- Bilmes, Leela (2001). "Sociolinguistic Aspects of Thai Politeness." PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley — Status particles kha / khrap; pronouns phom (citing Simpson 1997) and chan
- Powell, Larry; Amsbary, Jonathan; Hickson, Mark (2014). "The Wai in Thai Culture: Greeting, Status-Marking and National Identity Functions." Journal of Intercultural Communication, issue 34 — The wai as the most common greeting