Distribution

THAILAND.

Introduction

Thai (formerly called ‘Siamese’) is a member of the Tai family of languages which are dispersed over a wide area of Asia, from northern Vietnam to northern India. Thai is the national language of Thailand and as such is spoken by over fifty million people. Distinct regional dialects of Thai are spoken in the north, northeast and south of the country, but the language of the Central Region is regarded as the standard and is used both in schools and for official purposes throughout the country.

Thai, like Chinese, is a tonal language, with the meaning of each syllable being determined by the pitch at which it is pronounced. Standard Thai has five tones – mid, low, high, rising and falling. It is a non-inflected language and much of its original lexicon is monosyllabic; a high percentage of polysyllabic words are foreign borrowings, particularly from the classical Indian languages, Sanskrit and Pali.

Thai is written in an alphabetic script that was originally derived from Indian sources. It is written across the page from left to right; words are not separated as in most European languages, and where spaces do occur, they very often correspond to some form of punctuation in English, such as a full stop or comma.