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Thai linguistic data
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Common questions about Thai
What linguistic data does this Thai page show?
Word order, tone system, gender count, case marking, adposition direction, syllable structure, consonant inventory traits, vowel system, morphological alignment, script, register stratification, speaker count, and geographic area. Each row is one feature with Thai's value visible; you can add other languages to read the same feature side by side.
Where do the Thai data points come from?
Typological features are merged from URIEL+ (Mortensen et al.) and a curated set authored against descriptive grammars. Speaker counts come from Ethnologue and Glottolog. Geographic area is computed from the Asher 2007 world language atlas. Similarity scores combine genetic distance, typological overlap, and lexical-borrowing data.
How do Thai tones work?
Thai has five contour tones — mid (no diacritic), low (mai ek), falling (mai tho), high (mai tri), and rising (mai chattawa). Tone is determined by the combination of consonant class (high/mid/low), syllable shape (open/closed), vowel length, and any tone mark. Minimal pairs depend on tone alone: mai 'wood' (high), mai 'silk' (rising), mai 'new' (no tone), mai 'not' (falling).
Why doesn't Thai use spaces between words?
Thai orthography evolved from Old Khmer-style scripts that didn't separate words; modern Thai retains this. Spaces appear at sentence or major-clause boundaries instead. Word boundaries have to be inferred from context, syllable boundaries, and lexical knowledge — a non-trivial parsing problem for both human readers and software.
Why does Thai cluster with Lao on similarity scores?
Both are Tai-Kadai (Tai branch) languages, mutually intelligible to a high degree (Lao is sometimes treated as a Thai dialect politically), sharing SVO order, tones, classifiers, and a Brahmic-derived script. Vietnamese is in a different family (Austroasiatic) and shows lower similarity. The factor breakdown chip on the row tells you which dimensions contributed most.
Sources for Thai
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Iwasaki, Shoichi and Preeya Ingkaphirom (2005). A Reference Grammar of Thai. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Primary source for linking particle /kɔ̂/ ก็ (Ch 13, pp. 171-177), body-part expressions and /cay/ personality- vs-emotion word-order minimal pair (Ch 16, pp. 213-220), complementizer and quotative /wâa/ ว่า (Ch 21, pp. 259-267), reciprocal/distributive/collective /kan/ กัน (Ch 25, pp. 305-311), three-way passive (Ch 26, pp. 313-321), three-way periphrastic causative (Ch 27, pp. 323-337), topic-comment / topic-prominence (Ch 30, pp. 359-363), and the inflection-vs-derivation distinction with the /kaan-/, /khwaam-/, /nâa-/ prefix examples used in Step 3 (p. 3 §1.1 [no inflection]; §2.1.1 pp. 26-31 [productive prefixes]).
- Smyth, David (2014). Thai: An Essential Grammar. 2nd edition. London: Routledge.
- Noss, Richard B. (1964). Thai Reference Grammar. Washington, DC: Foreign Service Institute.
- Higbie, James and Snea Thinsan (2002). Thai Reference Grammar: The Structure of Spoken Thai. Bangkok: Orchid Press.
- Prasithrathsint, Amara (1985, 2001, 2004). Studies on the Thai passive, cited in Iwasaki & Ingkaphirom 2005 Ch 26.
- Singhapreecha, Pornsiri (2001). "Thai Classifiers and Complex Nominals." PACLIC 15. Primary source for the closed-class classifier inventory size: ~80 total classifiers, ~40 in everyday use (§3.1 p. 262, citing McFarland 1942 *Thai-English Dictionary*, Haas 1964 *Thai-English Student's Dictionary*, and Carpenter 1991 *J. Child Language* 18:93-113).