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The Thai language is spoken by approximately 50 million people
across the world and by 85% of the population in Thailand
itself. The language has its presence within small groups in
countries like the United States, the United Arab Emirates and
Singapore as well.
Considered as an ‘uninflected, primarily monosyllabic, tonal
language’ belonging to the ‘Ka-Tai Group’, the origin of this
Thai mode or articulation can be traced back to an area where
the current border of Vietnam and China lies. The Tai language
family from which this Siamese language has been derived is a
segment of the much larger Austric language group
The language shows predominant traits of association with the
spoken discourse of eastern Burma, northern Vietnam, Yunnan and
Laos.
King Ramkamhaeng – the third royal descendent in the Sukhothai
dynasty is considered to be the introducer of the ‘Thai
Language’ and also the inventor of the Sukhothai Script in 1238
AD. This second son of King Si Intharathit was an independent
lord with strong national feeling who wanted to form the new
official Thai script, pure and free from any Mon or Khmer
influence. The Sukhothai script can be linked to Grantha – a
form of the ancient Brahmi script from South India that
permeated through the Indo-Chinese border with the spread of
Buddhism and trade contacts to be blended with the Pali and
Sanskrit. Used till 1357, this script was replaced by ‘King Li
Thai Script’ incorporation a few moderations, during the reign
of King Li Thai, the grandson of King Ramkhamhaeng. However, the
alteration in the Thai script since its inception has been so
insignificant that the inscriptions from the Sukhothai era can
still be deciphered by the contemporary Thai readers.
The Thai language can be categorized under four predominant
dialects distributed across four major regional divides – the
southern, the northern (Yuan), the north-eastern (resembles Lao
Language) and central regions. The central Thai or the Bangkok
Thai is the more popularly and officially used version across
schools and media of communication. The minor dialects like
‘Phuan’ and ‘Lue’ are practiced by small populations.
The Thai alphabets series consists of forty four consonants and
fifteen basic vowel characters, written in a horizontal order
from left to right without any separating space, while syllable,
words and sentences are composed. In this alphabetic language
system, pronunciation of a word is independent of its meaning.
But unlike English, the Thai language has an unmistakable
tonality where each word is assigned a certain pitch
characteristic that need to be followed for proper
communication. Theories have revealed that the phonic pattern
has mid, low, high, rising and falling tones.
The Thai grammar is uncomplicated as the words here aren’t
modified or compounded for tenses, plurals, genders or
subject-verb agreement. There aren’t any use of articles either
like ‘a’, ‘an’ or ‘the’. Various modifying words or ‘particles’
serve the purpose of tenses, levels of politeness, verb-to-noun
conversation and other linguistic modulations when added to the
basics subject-verb-object format.
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