Thailanguage, also called SIAMESE, the standard spoken and literary language ofThailand, belonging to the Tai language family of Southeast Asia. It is based largely on the dialect of Bangkok and its environs in the central region of the country but retains certain consonant distinctions (such as I versu r; kl versus k), which are usually merged in the spoken language but preserved in the orthography. Other dialects, differing mostly in their tones and to some degree their consonants, are spoken in other major regions of the country. These are Northeastern (e.g., in Ubon Ratchathani, K.hon Kaen), Northern (around Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai), and Southern (Songkhla, akhon Si Thammarat). The Northeast• ern dialects are similar to those of Laos.
Thai words are predominantly monosyllabic, but many are polysyllabic. The language makes use of tones to distinguish between otherwi e identical words. There are five distinct tones in Thai: mid, low, falling, high, and rising. There are 21 consonant sounds and 9 distinguishable vowel qualities. Inflection is completely lacking in Thai, but word-compounding occurs widely-e.g., khamnam 'preface' (literally, 'word-leading'), and khdwcaj 'under- tand' (literally, 'enter-heart'). Synonym compounds like haanklaj 'far distant' and alliterative compounds like ramadrawan 'cautious' add greatly to the expressiveness of the language. Thai word order is quite rigid. The typical sentence contains subject, verb, and object in that order-e.g., khdw I rian2 khanidtasaad3 'he I studies2 mathematics3.' Modifiers follow the words thei modify, as in phaasda I thaj? 'Thai 2 language ' or wflJ I rew2'run I fast".'
Thai freely incorporates foreign words. Perhaps the oldest are Chinese, but recent Chinese loanwords also occur. Hundreds of elegant and literary words are taken from Pali and Sanskrit, and new words are al o coined from Sanskrit roots. There are also loanwords from Khmer (the official language of Cambodia), from I 6th-century Portuguese, from Austrone• sian, and in modem times increasingly from English. The Thai alphabet (instituted in the 13th century AD) derives ultimately from the southern type of lndic script. Writing proceeds from left to right, and spaces indicate punctuation but not word division. The alphabet has 42 consonant signs, 4 tone markers, and many vowel markers.

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