Thai language
Thai, or Central Thai, is a Tai language of the Kra–Dai language family spoken by the Central Thai, Mon, Lao Wiang, and Phuan people in Central Thailand and the vast majority of Thai Chinese enclaves throughout the country. It is the sole official language of Thailand.
Thai is the most spoken of over 60 languages of Thailand by both number of native and overall speakers. Over half of its vocabulary is derived from or borrowed from Pali, Sanskrit, Mon and Old Khmer. It is a tonal and analytic language. Thai has a complex orthography and system of relational markers. Spoken Thai, depending on standard sociolinguistic factors such as age, gender, class, spatial proximity, and the urban/rural divide, is partly mutually intelligible with Lao, Isan, and some fellow Thai topolects. These languages are written with slightly different scripts, but are linguistically similar and effectively form a dialect continuum.
The Thai language is spoken by over 70 million people in Thailand as of 2024. Moreover, most Thais in the northern, the Southern and the northeastern parts of the country today are bilingual speakers of Central Thai and their respective regional dialects because Central Thai is the language of television, education, news reporting, and all forms of media. A recent research found that the speakers of the Northern Thai language have become so few, as most people in northern Thailand now invariably speak Standard Thai, so that they are now using mostly Central Thai words and only seasoning their speech with the "Kham Mueang" accent. Standard Thai is based on the register of the educated classes by Central Thai and ethnic minorities in the area along the ring surrounding the Metropolis.
In addition to Central Thai, Thailand is home to other related Tai languages. Although most linguists classify these dialects as related but distinct languages, native speakers often identify them as regional variants or dialects of the "same" Thai language, or as "different kinds of Thai". As a dominant language in all aspects of society in Thailand, Thai initially saw gradual and later widespread adoption as a second language among the country's minority ethnic groups from the mid-late Ayutthaya period onward. Ethnic minorities today are predominantly bilingual, speaking Thai alongside their native language or dialect.
Classification
Standard Thai is classified as one of the Chiang Saen languages—others being Northern Thai, Southern Thai and numerous smaller languages, which together with the Northwestern Tai and Lao-Phutai languages, form the Southwestern branch of Tai languages. The Tai languages are a branch of the Kra–Dai language family, which encompasses a large number of indigenous languages spoken in an arc from Hainan and Guangxi south through Laos and Northern Vietnam to the Cambodian border.Standard Thai is the principal language of education and government and spoken throughout Thailand. The standard is based on the dialect of the central Thai people, and it is written in the Thai script.
History
Thai has undergone various historical sound changes. Some of the most significant changes occurred during the evolution from Old Thai to modern Thai. The Thai writing system has an eight-century history and many of these changes, especially in consonants and tones, are evidenced in the modern orthography.Early spread
According to a Chinese source, during the Ming dynasty, Yingya Shenglan, Ma Huan reported on the language of the Xiānluó or Ayutthaya Kingdom, saying that it somewhat resembled the local patois as pronounced in Guangdong Ayutthaya, the old capital of Thailand from 1351 - 1767 A.D., was from the beginning a bilingual society, speaking Thai and Khmer. Bilingualism must have been strengthened and maintained for some time by the great number of Khmer-speaking captives the Thais took from Angkor Thom after their victories in 1369, 1388 and 1431. Gradually toward the end of the period, a language shift took place. Khmer fell out of use. Both Thai and Khmer descendants whose great-grand parents or earlier ancestors were bilingual came to use only Thai. In the process of language shift, an abundance of Khmer elements were transferred into Thai and permeated all aspects of the language. Consequently, the Thai of the late Ayutthaya Period which later became Ratanakosin or Bangkok Thai, was a thorough mixture of Thai and Khmer. There were more Khmer words in use than Tai cognates. Khmer grammatical rules were used actively to coin new disyllabic and polysyllabic words and phrases. Khmer expressions, sayings, and proverbs were expressed in Thai through transference.Thais borrowed both the Royal vocabulary and rules to enlarge the vocabulary from Khmer. The Thais later developed the royal vocabulary according to their immediate environment. Thai and Pali, the latter from Theravada Buddhism, were added to the vocabulary. An investigation of the Ayutthaya Rajasap reveals that three languages, Thai, Khmer and Khmero-Indic were at work closely both in formulaic expressions and in normal discourse. In fact, Khmero-Indic may be classified in the same category as Khmer because Indic had been adapted to the Khmer system first before the Thai borrowed.
Old Thai
Old Thai had a three-way tone distinction on "live syllables", with no possible distinction on "dead syllables".There was a two-way voiced vs. voiceless distinction among all fricative and sonorant consonants, and up to a four-way distinction among stops and affricates. The maximal four-way occurred in labials and denti-alveolars ; the three-way distinction among velars and palatals, with the glottalized member of each set apparently missing.
The major change between old and modern Thai was due to voicing distinction losses and the concomitant tone split. This may have happened between about 1300 and 1600 CE, possibly occurring at different times in different parts of the Thai-speaking area. All voiced–voiceless pairs of consonants lost the voicing distinction:
- Plain voiced stops became voiceless aspirated stops.
- Voiced fricatives became voiceless.
- Voiceless sonorants became voiced.
The above consonant mergers and tone splits account for the complex relationship between spelling and sound in modern Thai. Modern "low"-class consonants were voiced in Old Thai, and the terminology "low" reflects the lower tone variants that resulted. Modern "mid"-class consonants were voiceless unaspirated stops or affricates in Old Thai—precisely the class that triggered lowering in original tone 1 but not tones 2 or 3. Modern "high"-class consonants were the remaining voiceless consonants in Old Thai. The three most common tone "marks" represent the three tones of Old Thai, and the complex relationship between tone mark and actual tone is due to the various tonal changes since then. Since the tone split, the tones have changed in actual representation to the point that the former relationship between lower and higher tonal variants has been completely obscured. Furthermore, the six tones that resulted after the three tones of Old Thai were split have since merged into five in standard Thai, with the lower variant of former tone 2 merging with the higher variant of former tone 3, becoming the modern "falling" tone.
Old Thai (Sukhothai) consonant inventory
Historical Sukhothai pronunciation
Early Old Thai
Early Old Thai also apparently had velar fricatives as distinct phonemes. These were represented by the now-obsolete letters ฃ kho khuat and ฅ kho khon, respectively. During the Old Thai period, these sounds merged into the corresponding stops, and as a result the use of these letters became unstable.At some point in the history of Thai, an alveolo-palatal nasal phoneme also existed, inherited from Proto-Tai. A letter ญ yo ying also exists, which is used to represent an alveolo-palatal nasal in words borrowed from Sanskrit and Pali, and is currently pronounced at the beginning of a syllable but at the end of a syllable. Most native Thai words that are reconstructed as beginning with are also pronounced in modern Thai, but generally spelled with ย yo yak, which consistently represents. This suggests that > in native words occurred in the pre-literary period. It is unclear whether Sanskrit and Pali words beginning with were borrowed directly with a, or whether a was re-introduced, followed by a second change >. The northeastern Thai dialect Isan and the Lao language still preserve the phoneme /ɲ/, which is represented in the Lao script by ຍ, such as in the word ຍຸງ. This letter is distinct from the phoneme and its Lao letter ຢ, such as in the word ຢາ. The distinction in writing has been lost in the informal writing of the Isan language with the Thai script and both sounds are represented by ย.
Proto-Tai also had a glottalized palatal sound, reconstructed as in Li Fang-Kuei. Corresponding Thai words are generally spelled หย, which implies an Old Thai pronunciation of , but a few such words are spelled อย, which implies a pronunciation of and suggests that the glottalization may have persisted through to the early literary period.
Vowel developments
The vowel system of modern Thai contains nine pure vowels and three centering diphthongs, each of which can occur short or long. According to Li, however, many Thai dialects have only one such short–long pair, and in general it is difficult or impossible to find minimal short–long pairs in Thai that involve vowels other than and where both members have frequent correspondences throughout the Tai languages. More specifically, he notes the following facts about Thai:- In open syllables, only long vowels occur.
- In closed syllables, the long high vowels are rare, and cases that do exist typically have diphthongs in other Tai languages.
- In closed syllables, both short and long mid and low do occur. However, generally, only words with short and long are reconstructible back to Proto-Tai.
- Both of the mid back unrounded vowels are rare, and words with such sounds generally cannot be reconstructed back to Proto-Tai.
This leads Li to posit the following:
- Proto-Tai had a system of nine pure vowels with no length distinction, and possessing approximately the same qualities as in modern Thai: high, mid, low.
- All Proto-Tai vowels were lengthened in open syllables, and low vowels were also lengthened in closed syllables.
- Modern Thai largely preserved the original lengths and qualities, but lowered to, which became short in closed syllables and created a phonemic length distinction. Eventually, length in all other vowels became phonemic as well and a new was introduced, through a combination of borrowing and sound change. Li believes that the development of long from diphthongs, and the lowering of to to create a length distinction, had occurred by the time of Proto-Southwestern-Tai, but the other missing modern Thai vowels had not yet developed.