History and Development
Thai is spoken by the majority of the population in Thailand, as well as by smaller groups of people in other countries. Linguists disagree on the number of Thai dialects in existence. Some linguists believe that a large percentage of Thai speakers actually speak some variant of Standard Thai. The question of dialects is further complicated by the fact that Lao, the language spoken in Laos, is also called Eastern Thai; Lanna, spoken in the Thailand’s northern provinces, is also called Northern Thai; and Isan, which is spoken in northeastern Thailand, is also called Northeastern Thai. Not all of these dialects are mutually comprehensible.
Thai, which is sometimes referred to as Siamese, is part of the Tai language family. The languages in this family belong to the much larger Austric language group. The origin of the Thai alphabet is debated by linguists, but it is likely that its roots spring from Southern India. Through the centuries, Mon, Khmer, Sanskrit, and Pali have all influenced the Thai language in both vocabulary and grammatical structures. More recently, Chinese and English words relating to business, commerce, and cuisine have been integrated into the language.
Formal and Informal Address in the Thai Language
English speakers will notice that there are different ways to address people to show varying degrees of respect or to acknowledge a person’s social rank. For example, there are particles that can be added at the end of a sentence to indicate deference to the person being spoken to, or to communicate the speaker’s opinion about what is being described.
Thai Grammar
Thai is a tonal language, which means that the same word can convey different meanings depending on the tone with which it is pronounced. There are five tones: low, high, mid-pitch, rising, and falling. Four of these tones are indicated by signs over the consonants, while the fifth is indicated by the absence of a sign. As a tonal language, Thai is devoid of inflection (such as the rising voice an English speaker might use to show that he is asking a question). Instead, mood, questions, negation, and other parts of speech are constructed by adding certain words to sentences.
Some aspects of Thai grammar are far simpler than in other languages. For example, there are no gendered or numbered nouns in Thai, and there are no cases. There are also no verb conjugations in Thai. The same verb form is used regardless of the subject of the sentence. Thai verbs also do not change form in different tenses, such as present, past, or future. Instead, distinctions between tenses are marked by adverbs and expressions of time or by the context of the sentence.
Most Thai words are monosyllabic. More complex words generally may be formed by combining two monosyllabic words. There are, however, some polysyllabic words, especially those borrowed from Sanskrit, English, and other languages that cannot be broken down into monosyllabic components.
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