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Thai Romanization

The method of Chinese romanization most commonly used in Taiwan is the Wade-Giles system. In 2002, Taiwan authorities announced adoption of the pinyin system used on the mainland to replace the Wade-Giles system, but its use is not consistent throughout society, often resulting in two or more romanizations for the same place or person. This situation in Thailand is more complex. Since there is no a mutual standard, writing a Thai word in English letters is not trivial, and it is quite a labor intensive task if it cannot be computerized. The romanization is not a simple one-to-one matching.

A romanization system for Thai was developed by the Royal Institute of Thailand. It was officially endorsed by the government of Thailand in 2000 and approved for use by the United Nations in 2002. The system is a revised version of the 1967 Royal Institute of Thailand system previously used by BGN and PCGN. This revision principally affects vowels, where additional romanizations have been introduced to provide further differentiation. Indications of vowel length and tone are not included in the system.

As far as standards for the romanization of Thai words and names are concerned, the Royal Institute’s system is worth considering for two reasons. It is systematic enough to guarantee the uniform romanized spelling of every Thai word. In addition, as the official system sanctioned by the government authorities, it is used for the great majority of place names in Thailand, and has thus gained wide currency.

Word boundaries are not ordinarily shown in Thai writing. Characters are not always written in the sequence in which they should be romanized. Characters which are phonologically superfluous, and characters which indicate tone, should not be romanized. Since correct identification of the words which appear in any particular name and knowledge of their correct pronunciation are essential in the romanization of Thai, each word should be verified in a dictionary of pronunciation, or the name should be verified in an official Thai place names document which provides Roman-script spellings.

In general, Thai words formulated by romanization are made up of a single syllable, and thus each syllable is considered a separate word, with a space between each. There are dozens of exceptions to this rule. This is in contrast to many multisyllabic words that are foreign to Thai but that are found written in the Thai script. These multisyllabic foreign words are written with the space closed up between the syllables as appropriate. Prominent examples are words of Pali and Sanskrit origin, as well as some words that are Thai in origin but have been formed according to the grammar of Pali or Sanskrit.

Not unrelated to the romanization of Pali and Sanskrit borrowings in English, there is a problem of how to romanize proper names in Thai. It is all too well known that different people, Thais and Westerners alike, might spell the same name differently, in some cases according to their own system, but in most cases without any system at all. The problem is further complicated by the fact that many Thai proper names contain elements of Pali and Sanskrit origins. Some people, even with a slight knowledge of these two languages, might be tempted to spell such names as closely as possible to their original forms, e.g. Ayudhya rather than Ayutthaya.