Thai
Description
Thai, sometimes referred to as Siamese, is spoken in the central plains of Thailand and in Bangkok, the capital. Estimates of total numbers of speakers vary widely as well as the percentages of the total population of Thailand who speak Thai. Low estimates cite 20 to 25 million speakers, or about 45 percent of Thailand's population; high estimates are for about 37 million speakers or 80 percent of the population. This includes almost 5 million ethnic Chinese who are Thai speakers and almost 500,000 speakers of Khorat, a dialect of Thai. Small populations, less than 15,000 each, use the language in the USA, the United Arab Emirates, and Singapore.
Thai is a member of the Southwestern subgroup of the Tai or Dai family whose better known members include: Lao and Shan.
Thai uses a script that is basically alphabetic in nature with some elements of a syllabic system. In origin it derives from an Indic script which was adapted first by the Khmer and then the Thai. There is a fairly good approximation between the script and pronunciation.
Thai has borrowed heavily from Mon and Khmer. Literary Thai depends on Sanskrit and Pali, another Indic language, for much of its learned vocabulary--a situation analogous to English's dependence on Latin. Chinese has also been an important source of an early loan set contributing numerals and some few hundred basic terms. In the modern era culinary and commercial vocabulary has also entered the language from Chinese. Because of the polysyllabic nature of the large amount of Indic loans, Thai changed from a basic monosyllabic language in its morphemic structure to one that is now polysyllabic. English has also become an important source of loans especially in the popular cultural sphere, in the mass media, and in commerce.
Thai is the official national language in Thailand and is used in education, the media, and government administration and bureaucracy. Most Thai people who are not native speakers--that is speakers of the many minority languages --have at least some passive competence in the language. Official policy is to promote and further Standard Thai in order to create unity among linguistic diversity. Thai itself, along with Chinese and English, is a functioning trade language. Newspapers, periodicals and radio are mainly in Standard Thai.
Around the mid-thirteenth century, the first script--known as the Sukhotai and distinct from that used by the Khmer--was developed for Thai. The script now in use is a more or less modified variant of this and other intervening scripts used during the reign of monarchs throughout Thailand’s history.
(Source: UCLA Language Materials Project Language Profiles)
Instructor
Ms. Nongpoth Sternstein
Email
nsternstein@theironist.com