Thai language

Phonology

Tones

There are five phonemic tones: middle, low, high, rising and falling. They are indicated in the written 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 tonal rules are shown in the following chart:

Related Topics:
Vowel length - Unvoiced - Plosive - Voiced - Sonorant - Tone mark

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The letters ห (high class) and sometimes อ (mid class) are used as silent letters before another consonant to produce the correct tone. In polysyllabic words, an initial high class consonant with an implicit vowel renders the following syllable also high class.

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There are a few exceptions to this system, notably the pronouns chan and khao, which are both pronounced with a high tone rather than the rising tone indicated by the script (in an informal conversation, generally when these words are recited or read in public, they are pronouced in rising tone).

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Consonants

Thai distinguishes among three voice/aspiration patterns for plosive consonants:

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• unvoiced, unaspirated
• unvoiced, aspirated
• voiced, unaspirated

Where English has only a distinction between the voiced, unaspirated {{IPA|/b/}} and the unvoiced, aspirated {{IPA|/p/}}, Thai distinguishes a third sound which is neither voiced nor aspirated, which occurs in English only as an allophone of {{IPA|/p/}}, approximately the sound of the p in "spin." There is similarly an alveolar {{IPA|/t/}}, {{IPA|/tʰ/}}, {{IPA|/d/}} triplet. In the velar series there is a {{IPA|/k/}}, {{IPA|/kʰ/}} pair and in the postalveolar series the {{IPA|/tɕ/}}, {{IPA|/tɕʰ/}} pair.

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In each cell below, the first line indicates International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the second indicates the Thai characters in initial position (more letters appearing in the same box have identical pronunciation).

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* the glottal plosive is implied after a short vowel without final, or the silent อ before a vowel.

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Vowels

The basic vowels of the Thai language, from front to back and close to open, are given in the following table, The top entry in every cell is the symbol from the International phonetic alphabet, the second entry gives the spelling in the Thai alphabet, where a dash (–) indicates the position of the initial consonant after which the vowel is pronounced. A second dash indicates that a final consonant must follow.

Related Topics:
International phonetic alphabet - Thai alphabet

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The vowels each exist in long-short pairs: these are distinct phonemes forming unrelated words in Thai, but usually transliterated the same: เขา (khao) means he or she, while ขาว (khao) means white.

Related Topics:
Long-short pairs - Phoneme

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The long-short pairs are as follows:

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The basic vowels can be combined into diphthongs as follows:

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Additionally, there are three triphthongs, all of which are long:

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For a guide to written vowels, see the Thai alphabet page.

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