Thai dialects

When foreigners learn Thai, what they most probably learn is the dialect known as Central Thai. However, Thai is far from being a uniform language, and although the dialects are mutually intelligible, even Thai people can sometimes struggle to understand someone from another part of the country.

Broadly speaking, Thai can be divided into Central Thai (spoken in Bangkok and the central region of the country, and taught as standard in all Thai schools), Northeastern Thai (spoken in the Isaan region), Northern Thai and Southern Thai. In addition, Thais living near the Cambodian border often speak Khmer as their first language, while many Chinese Thai speak the Chinese language known in Thai as tae jiw.

However, these sweeping categories in fact conceal a number of even smaller dialects. The Pattani dialect, for instance, is thought to be spoken by over 3 million inhabitants of the four southernmost provinces, while Khorat Thai is spoken by around 2 million people living around Nakhon Ratchasima. Mon, one of the languages of Burma (Myanmar) is spoken along the Thai-Burmese border, and even as far from the border as Lopburi and Nonthaburi, and some of the ‘hill tribes’ in the North have quite sizeable numbers of speakers of languages including Thai Lue (around 100,000 speakers), Akha and Thai Yai, to name but a few.

While the vast majority of dialects (around 90%) spoken in Thailand are members of the Tai-Kadai family of languages, smaller minorities speak languages belonging to the Austro-Asiastic family, Austronesian family and Tibeto-Burman family.

In the coming few posts, I will look at some of these dialects, and their similarities with Central Thai.