A Brief Overview Of Thai Language Most people who learn to speak Thai are those who visit Thailand or come to work here. The need to learn Thai arises mainly from necessity as natives of Thailand rarely speak English. Moreover, it is customary to speak to strangers in Thailand. So, they highly appreciate foreigners who attempt to speak in Thai. Attempting to learn thai language isn’t much difficult as one can make simple conversations after learning few phrases in general.
Roots Of Thai Thai belongs to the Tai language family that consists of a group of related languages that are spoken in Thailand, Burma, Laos, Northern Vietnam and Southern China. Thai language is exclusively spoken in Thailand by over 60 million people and the dialect spoken in the central region is considered as Standard Thai which is used for all purposes - official, media, communication and education throughout the country. Thai dialects vary from region to region. Primary dialects include the Northern, Southern and The Northeastern. The standard Thai that has been mentioned above is also known as Siamese or Central Thai and is based essentially on the dialect spoken in Thailand and the surrounding region. Foreign Influences On The Language Thai uses foreign words freely in their script and dialects and has subsumed a notable number of loanwords from a variety of languages over time. The oldest of them have been supposedly
derived from Chinese. Over the recent years, other loanwords have been imbibed from Sanskrit, Khmer and Portuguese.
Grammar And Tones Thai is a very succinct language that has words for basic meaning combined with prefixes and phrases to form complex meanings. Unlike western languages, thai grammar is simpler and the structure of sentences is also simple where meaning usually follows word by word. Thai’s grammar is of word order and there is no modification of words to form tenses, verbs, gender or plural forms. Also, articles such as ‘a’, ‘an’ and ‘the’ are not used. Thai language uses 44 consonants, fifteen basic vowel characters and five tone markers. The alphabets are horizontally placed from left to right with no intervening space to form words, syllables or sentences. Vowels are written above or below, before or after the consonant that they modify though the consonant always sounds first when one speaks the syllable. The vowel characters and few consonants can be combined in myriad ways to form numerous compound vowels. Unlike Chinese, Thai language is alphabetic and hence, pronunciation of words is independent of their meaning, like English. However, thai is tonal like Chinese which means each word has a characteristic tone and pitch that must be clearly spoken in order to convey the right meaning. They have five tone markers: low, mid, high, rising and falling. In regard to introduction of thai course Singapore has opened many schools for keen learners living in the city who wish to expand their linguistic prospects. One of the most trusted schools for learning thai is Stanford language Center; they offer basic conversational courses for Southeast languages including Thai. You can check their website for further details.