Thai alphabet - Definition and Overview

The Thai alphabet (ตัวอักษรไทย) is used to write the Thai language (ภาษาไทย) and other minority languages in Thailand. It has forty-four consonants (พยัญชนะ), twenty-eight vowel forms (รูปสระ) and four tone marks (วรรณยุกต์). The consonants are written horizontally from left to right, while the vowels are arranged above, below, to the left or to the right of the corresponding consonant.

Unlike the Roman alphabet, the Thai alphabet does not distinguish minuscule and majuscule letters. It is usually written with no space between words, which is facilitated by the fact that most Thai words have only one syllable. The end of sentences is marked by a space.

There is a set of Thai numerals (ตัวเลขไทย), but the so-called Arabic numerals (ตัวเลขอารบิก) are also commonly used.

History

The Thai alphabet is probably derived from the Old Khmer (อักขระเขมร) script, which is a southern Brahmic script of the Indic family. According to tradition it was created in 1283 by King Ramkhamhaeng the Great (พ่อขุนรามคำแหงมหาราช).

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. Their continued use is necessary to differentiate among unrelated loan-words which are Thai homophones. The consonants are divided into three classes - low, middle and high - 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 khor khai (ข ไข่), in which khor is the sound it represents, and khai (ไข่) is a word which starts with the same sound and means "egg".

Equivalents for Romanization are shown in the table below, although there is no single standard. Many consonants are pronounced differently at the beginning and at the end of a syllable: the first entry in the equivalent column is the pronunciation for that consonant in the initial position, and the second entry is the pronunciation in the final position. Where the second entry under "Equivalent" 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'.

Two of the consonants (khor khuat and khor khon) aren't used in written Thai anymore. 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.

* Consonant-vowel combination characters, not members of any group.

** อ is a special case in that at the beginning of a word it is used as a placeholder for vowels that may not appear there (all vowels are written relative to a consonant — see below). When it is used in this way it is always silent.

Vowels

Thai vowel sounds and diphthongs are written using a mixture of vowel symbols, consonants, and combinations of vowel symbols. Each vowel is shown in its correct position relative to a consonant. Note that vowels can go above, below, left of or right of the consonant; some are written with symbols to both the left and right of the consonant; and if the syllable starts with a consonant cluster, they are two positions to the left of the consonant whose sound precedes the vowel. There is a standard for Romanising vowels. This article gives a set devised to avoid confounding different vowels which are commonly transliterated as if the same. Variants represent the most commonly used other transcriptions. Sounds are very approximate equivalents in Northeastern US English.

* vowels or diphthongs written with consonant symbols

Diacritics

Each mark is shown in its correct location relative to the consonant kor kai. The names of the tones are derived from the numbers one, two, three and four in an Indic language.

Other symbols

Thai in computing

TIS-620 is the best-established character set and character encoding for the Thai alphabet. TIS-620 has been adopted verbatim by in the Unicode range for Thai, U+0E00 ... U+0E7F.

See Also

• Royal Thai General System of Transcription
• Thai language
• Thailand