Kham Mueung: the language of the North

My previous post looked at the Lao dialect spoken in Thailand’s Northeastern region, but today, I want to move westwards and look at the language spoken in the North.

Northern Thai, or kham mueng (คำเมือง) as it is locally known, is predominantly spoken in the northernmost provinces of Chiang Mai, Mae Hong Son, Chiang Rai, Phrae, Nan, Lamphun, Lampang and Tak, although it is also spoken less widely further south. It is also the main language spoken by the Thai Yuan ethnic group, and thus pockets of it are found wherever members of this group have migrated, particularly in Saraburi, Ratchaburi and Nakhon Ratchasima provinces.

Kham Mueng has is origins in the Lanna Kingdom, which ruled northern Thailand together with parts of China and Burma from the 13th to the 16th centuries. Originally it used its own script, known as Tua Mueng (ตั๋วเมือง or ตัวเมือง), derived from the Mon alphabet, although this is now only found in Buddhist manuscripts in the region.

For the most part, Kham Mueng is very similar to Central Thai, and where it does differ, it is largely a matter of tone. Thus while the word for ‘ten’ in Central Thai is pronounced with a low tone, in Northern Thai it has a high tone.

One noticeable difference is that the letter ‘r’ in Central Thai is generally transformed into an ‘h’ in Kham Mueng, so that, for example, rao (‘we’) becomes hao, and rak (‘love’) is pronounced hak.

Some words, however, differ entirely between Central and Northern Thai. Yee sip (ยี่สิบ) or ‘twenty’ in Central Thai is sao (ซาว) in Kham Mueng, chorp (ชอบ) ‘to like’ is mak (มัก), and dern (เดิน) ‘to walk’ is variously translated as tiaw, tew, or yaang (เตียว, เตว, ย่าง). These are just examples, and the list is fairly extensive; not so extensive, however, as to make it impossible for speakers of the two dialects to understand one another.

Advertisement