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Thai Language

Four main dialects are recognized, the "khammuang" or Northern dialect, the "lao" or Northeastern dialect, the "tai" or Southern dialect, and the "klang" or Central dialect. While all Thai students use books written in central Thai, and they all understand it, many don’t actually ever learn to speak it. Some sources claim that no social stigma is attached to any of these dialects, but most sources say otherwise. Bangkokians look down upon the northeastener as a rustic bumpkin who cannot even speak "proper" Thai. Before the 1930s the only ones who knew Central Thai were those born to aristocratic families, the wealthy, or those who became monks and novices. Before this time, only a few men knew how to read and write, and then only in the northern Thai language which they had learned from the monks or their fathers. Central Thai was considered privileged knowiedge.

The dialect one hears on radio and television is the Bangkok dialect, considered the standard dialect. Central Thai is the language taught in schools and used in government. Lao, as well as “Isaan dialect”, is spoken widely in northeastern Thailand; “Gam Muang” or northern dialect is spoken in the north; and a southern Thai dialect in the mid-south. Several other Tai dialects are spoken among smaller groups, such as the Shan (Tai Yai), Lue, and Phutai.

Tai speakers are the most widespread of SoutheastAsian peoples. Their extent covers eight countries: China, India, Burma, Thailand, Laos,Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia, and goes from latitudes 7° to 26° N and from longitudes 94° to 110° E. Nevertheless, the Tai are remarkably homogeneous physically, culturally and linguistically. Both spoken and written Thai are quite different from many other languages and hence too complicated for non-native speakers to pick up quickly. However, as Thai society becomes more and more international, the use of English has taken on a major role in everyday life; for instance, road signs throughout Thailand are now in both Thai and English, and most places frequented by visitors, even restaurants and shops, have information in English.

The Thai language is neatly and pleasantly structured, reflecting the Thai identity in many ways. It is used only in Thailand, and communicates the gentle nature of the Thai people, for example, through the particles, such as khrap for men and kha for women. Such particles vary with the status of the speakers and the persons spoken to. These are further complicated in the royal language, not to mention a large vocabulary of royal words.

Various regions and localities, meanwhile, use different dialects. The charm of the dialect, apart from serving as an exclusive means of communication in the same locality, also binds the community through custom and tradition, particularly in folk performances such as mo lam of the Northeast and nora of the South, in which local dialects are the main components and provide much of the color. The dialect of each locality varies in tones and words in accordance with ethnicity, lifestyle, and geographical features. Yet the difference is not so great from locality to locality, but is noticeable only from region to region.

The central region, with different local dialects, communicates at ease with Bangkok and between communities, as the dialects are close to the standard Thai used as the official language and in teaching and learning. The only difference from standard Thai may be a simplified form of speech and words, with some tonal variations that can be identified with certain locales.

The official national language, spoken by almost 100 per cent of the population, is Thai, classified by linguists as belonging to a Chinese -Thai branch of the Sino -Tibetan family. It is a tonal language, uninflected, and predominantly monosyllabic. Most polysyllabic words in the vocabulary have been borrowed, mainly from Khmer, Pali, or Sanskrit. Dialects are spoken in rural areas. Principal other languages are Chinese and Malay. English, a mandatory subject in public schools, is widely spoken and understood, particularly in Bangkok and other major cities. In Thailand's major cities, the level of English can be quite good, but visitors will find that the Thais' ability to speak English diminishes as one moves further away from the population centers.

The Thai language is liberally sprinkled with words from Pali and Sanskrit (the classical languages, respectively, of Theravada Buddhism and Indian Hinduism). Written Thai employs an alphabet of 44 consonants and 32 vowels that combine to form syllabic sounds. King Ramkhamhaeng the Great who ruled the Sukhothai Kingdom from 1279-1298 initiated the Thai inscription in 1292. The inscription is considered to be a seminal source of Sukhothai history as well as a masterpiece of Thai literature.

There are five tones, 44 consonants, and 32 vowels The Thai phoneme set consists of 21 consonantal phonemes, 17 consonantal cluster phonemes, and 24 vowels. Vowels are further divided into 9 short, 9 long vowels, and 6 diphthongs. Each vowel can carry one of 5 tones: low, mid, high, falling and rising. The syllable structure follows 4 patterns: CV, CCV, CVCf and CCVCf, with C, CC, Cf, V representing an initial consonant, a cluster consonant, a final consonant and a vowel respectively. Only 8 out of the 21 consonantal phonemes can be final consonants.

Thai is a tonal monosyllabic language. The same word can be said in five different ways - normal or middle tone, high, low, rising and falling. Like English, it is read from left to right, but that is where the similarities end. Some English sounds like "th", "v" and "z" do not appear at all, while some Thai sounds are not commonly used in English either. Further, it should be noted that in transcribing Thai sounds into English phonetics some consonants (e.g., b, p, l, n, d, and t) can be used interchangeably. There are no plurals in Thai, nor are there tenses as such. A word or two is usually added to determine the past, present or future.

With respect to speech recognition the Thai language bearschallenging characteristics: (1) the usage of tones to discriminate meaning, which has an impact on the feature set used for acoustic modeling, (2) the relatively poor letter-to-sound relation, which makes the process of dictionary generation more challenging, and (3) the lack of word segmentation, which calls for automatic segmentation approaches to make n-gram language modeling feasible.