Thai

Five: mid, low, falling, high, and rising. Tones are part of every word and change meaning entirely. The same syllable 'maa' across the five tones produces five separate words. Thai tone marking in writing follows a complex rule system that depends on the consonant class of the initial consonant — three classes (high, mid, low) interact with the tone marks to determine which surface tone a syllable carries.

Thai script writes connected text with spaces only at major sentence breaks rather than between every word. Word boundaries within a clause are inferred by readers based on context, vocabulary, and grammar. This is one of the harder features for learners — even reading-fluent learners often struggle with word segmentation in unfamiliar text. Thai is far from alone in this; Khmer, Burmese, and Lao all use similar conventions.

Thai has a special register — ราชาศัพท์ (rachasap, royal language) — used when speaking to or about the royal family. It's a separate vocabulary, drawing heavily on Sanskrit and Pali, that replaces almost every common word with its honorific equivalent. Royal Thai appears in news coverage of the monarchy, official ceremonies, and historical texts. Most Thais use it rarely but understand it from television and education.

No — Thai is Tai-Kadai, a separate family. Centuries of contact have produced Chinese loanwords in Thai, especially in trade and culinary vocabulary, and the tone systems of both families have similar structural roles. But Thai grammar (SVO with classifiers and aspect particles) and core vocabulary are independently developed. Thai is closer to Lao than to any Chinese variety.

The grammar is light — no inflection, no conjugation. The script takes substantial time because of the consonant class system and the lack of word spaces. Tones are slow to internalize. Most learners reach reading and conversation faster than they reach fluent tone production. Vocabulary draws heavily on Sanskrit, Pali, Khmer, and Chinese, with limited overlap with English.