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Beginner video tutorials for speaking Thai from www.pinpointthailand.com

If you like what you see and want some 1 to 1 lessons please visit www.pinpointthailand.com

Video Tutorials for Thai Alphabet

History

The Thai alphabet is derived from the Old Khmer script (Thai: อักขระเขมร, akchara khamen), which is a southern Brahmic style of writing called Vatteluttu. Vatteluttu was also commonly known as the Pallava script by scholars of Southeast Asian studies such as George Coedes. According to tradition it was created in 1283 by King Ramkhamhaeng the Great (Thai: พ่อขุนรามคำแหงมหาราช).

Orthography

Thai letters do not have small and capatal forms like the Roman alphabet. Texts are usually written with no space between words.

Minor pauses in sentences may be marked by a comma (Thai: จุลภาค or ลูกน้ำ, chun lap hâk or lûk nám), and major pauses by a period (Thai: มหัพภาค or จุด, ma hàp phâk or chùt), but most often are marked by a blank space (Thai: วรรค, wák). A bird's eye ๏ (Thai: ตาไก่, ta kài), officially called (Thai: ฟองมัน, fong man), formerly indicated paragraphs, but is now obsolete.

A khomut ๛ (Thai: โคมูตร) can be used to mark the end of a chapter or document.

Thai writing also uses quotation marks (Thai: อัญประกาศ, an-yá-prà-kàt) and parentheses (round brackets) (Thai: วงเล็บ, wong lép), but not square brackets or braces.

Alphabet listing

You will need a Unicode-capable browser and font that contains the Thai alphabet to view the Thai letters below.

Consonants

There are 44 consonants representing 21 distinct consonant sounds. Duplicate consonants represent different Sanskrit and Pali consonants pronounced identically in Thai. The consonants are divided into three classes — low (Thai: เสียงต่ำ, siang tam ), middle (Thai: เสียงกลาง, siang klang) and high (Thai: เสียงสูง, siang sung) — which determine the tone of the following vowel. There are in addition four consonant-vowel combination characters not included in the tally of 44.

To aid learning, each consonant is traditionally associated with a Thai word that either starts with the same sound, or features it prominently. For example, the name of the letter ข is kho khai (ข ไข่), in which kho is the sound it represents, and khai (ไข่) is a word which starts with the same sound and means "egg".

Two of the consonants, ฃ (kho khuat) and ฅ (kho khon), are not used in written Thai anymore, but still appear on many keyboards and in character sets. Some say^[1] that when the first Thai typewriter was developed by Edwin Hunter McFarland in 1892, there was simply no space for all characters, thus two had to be left out. Also, neither of these two letters correspond to a Sanskrit or Pali letter, and each of them, being a modified form of the letter that precedes it (compare ข and ค), has the same pronunciation and the same consonant class as the preceding letter. This makes them redundant. Set in 1890's Siam, a 2006 film titled in Thai: ฅนไฟบิน Flying Fire Person (in English: Dynamite Warrior), uses ฅ kho khon to spell ฅน Person. Compare entry for ฅ in table below, where person is spelled คน.

Equivalents for romanisation are shown in the table below. Many consonants are pronounced differently at the beginning and at the end of a syllable. The entries in columns initial and final indicate the pronunciation for that consonant in the corresponding positions in a syllable. Where the entry is '-', the consonant may not be used to close a syllable. Where a combination of consonants ends a written syllable, only the first is pronounced; possible closing consonant sounds are limited to 'k', 'm', 'n', 'ng', 'p' and 't'.

Although an official standard for romanisation is the Royal Thai General System of Transcription (RTGS) defined by the Royal Thai Institute, many publications use different Romanisation systems. In daily practice, a bewildering variety of Romanisations are used, making it difficult to know how to pronounce a word, or to judge if two words (e.g. on a map and a street sign) are actually the same. For more precise information, an equivalent from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is given as well.

Each consonant is assigned to a "class" (low, middle, or high), which plays a role in determining the tone with which the syllable is pronounced.

* อ is a special case in that at the beginning of a word it is used as a silent initial for syllables that start with a vowel (all vowels are written relative to a consonant — see below). The same symbol is used as a vowel in non-initial position.

Vowels

Thai vowel sounds and diphthongs are written using a mixture of vowel symbols on a consonant base. Each vowel is shown in its correct position relative to a base consonant (indicated by a dash '–') and sometimes a final consonant as well (second dash). Note that vowels can go above, below, left of or right of the consonant, or combinations of these places. If a vowel has parts before and after the initial consonant, and the syllable starts with a consonant cluster, the split will go around the whole cluster.

The inherent vowels are /a/ in open syllables (CV) and /o/ in closed syllables (CVC). For example, ถนน transcribes /tʰànǒn/ "road". There are a few exceptions in Pali loanwords, where the inherent vowel of an open syllable is /o/. The circumfix vowels, such as เ–าะ /ɔʔ/, encompass a preceding consonant with an inherent vowel. For example, /pʰɔʔ/ is written เพาะ, and /tɕʰapʰɔʔ/ "only" is written เฉพาะ.

Characters ฤ ฤๅ (plus ฦ ฦๅ, which are obsolete and no longer used) are usually considered as vowels, the first being a short vowel sound, and the latter, long. As alphabetical entries, ฤ ฤๅ follow ร, and themselves can be read as a combination of consonant and vowel, equivalent to รึ (short), and รือ, (long) (and the obsolete pair as ลึ, ลือ) respectively. Moreover, ฤ can act as ริ as an integral part in many words mostly borrowed from Sanskrit such as กฤษณะ (kritna, not kruesana) ฤทธิ์ (rit, not ruet) กฤษดา (krisada, not kruetsada), for example. It is also used to spell อังกฤษ angrit English and ประเทศอังกฤษ Prathet angrit England.

The pronunciation below is indicated by the International Phonetic Alphabet and the Romanisation according to the Royal Thai Institute as well as several variant Romanisations often encountered. A very approximate equivalent is given for various regions of English speakers and surrounding areas. A dash represents the position of a consonant cluster. Vowels that only exist in closed syllables either have one dash and an explicit consonant or they have two dashes, the first one representing the initial consonant and the latter representing the final.

* These are semi-vowels or diphthongs written with consonant symbols.

** Only 20 Thai words use sara ai mai muan (ใ). Other words use one of the /ɑj/ variants.

Diacritics

Diacritics are used with the Thai alphabet to indicate modifications of the values of the letters.

Thai is a tonal language, and the script gives full information on the tones. Tones are realised in the vowels, but indicated in the script by a combination of the class of the initial consonant (high, mid or low), vowel length (long or short), closing consonant (unvoiced-plosive or voiced-sonorant) and sometimes one of four tone marks. The names and signs of the tone marks are derived from the numbers one, two, three and four in an Indic language. The rules for denoting tones are shown in the following chart:

"None", that is, no tone marker, is used with the base accent (พื้นเสียง, pheun siang). Mai tri and mai chattawa are only used with mid-class consonants.

Two consonant characters (not diacritics) are used to modify the tone:

• ห นำ ho nam, leading ho. A silent, high-class ห "leads" low-class nasal consonants (ง, ญ, น and ม) and non-plosives (ว, ย, ร and ล), which have no corresponding high-class phonetic match, into the tone properties of a high-class consonant. In polysyllabic words, an initial mid- or high-class consonant with an implicit vowel similarly "leads" these same low-class consonants into the higher class tone rules, with the tone marker borne by the low-class consonant.

• อ นำ o nam, leading o. In four words only, a silent, mid-class อ "leads" low-class ย into mid-class tone rules: อย่า (ya, don't) อยาก (yak, desire) อย่าง (yang, yet) อยู่ (yu, stay). Note all four have long-vowel, low-tone siang ek, but อยาก, a dead syllable, needs no tone marker, but the three live syllables all take mai ek.

Exceptions where words are spelled with one tone but pronounced with another often occur in informal conversation (notably the pronouns ฉัน chan and เขา khao, which are both pronounced with a high tone rather than the rising tone indicated by the script). Generally, when such words are recited or read in public, they are pronounced as spelled.

Other diacritics are used to indicate short vowels and silent consonants:

• Mai taikhu means "stick that climbs and squats". It is a miniature Thai numeral 8 ๘ and is informally called mai lek paet "stick #8". Mai taikhu is used only with sara e (เ) and sara ae (แ) in closed syllables.
• Thanthakhat means "executioner's axe"; karan means "canceled".

Other symbols