Thai Language

Southeast Asian Studies

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Thai Language

About the Thai Language

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Thai is the official language of Thailand, a kingdom of roughly 60 million people. Thai, a monosyllabic and tonal language, is unique in that it bears little resemblance to any of the neighboring languages of East or Southeast Asia, including Chinese, Burmese, Khmer, Vietnamese, and Malay. Thai belongs to the Tai language family. Apart from the Thai of present-day Thailand, the Lao peoples of the Republic of Laos, the Shan, who inhabit northeastern Burma, and various highland peoples in northern Vietnam and southern China, speak a related Tai language, bringing the total number of Tai speakers in Southeast Asia to more than 80 million.
Thai has its own script and its own unique alphabet. Thai has consonants and vowels like English. However, when written, the vowels may appear either above, below, in front, or after the consonant. In addition to vowels, tone markers are also written above consonants and vowels. When writing Thai, one does not include space between words—each sentence appears as a single line, as evidenced below (It is not as difficult as it looks).

ภาษาไทยเป็นภาษาประจำชาติของคนไทย เปรียบประดุจดั่ง
ต้นไม้ที่ได้แตกกิ่งก้านสาขาและเจริญเติบโตงอกงาม โดยเราได้รับเอา
ภาษาบาลี สันสกฤต เขมร จีน ฯลฯ มาใช้ ทำให้ภาษาไทยแตกกิ่งก้าน
สาขามากมาย มีคำเพิ่มมากขึ้นตามกาลเวลา

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