Volume 2007, Issue 186

When people who live outside Thailand hear about Thailand, it is mostly about the beauty of the country, the warmth of the people, or the beloved monarch King Bhumibol Adulyadej. Many are, however, unaware that Thai language and society are just as worthy of attention and study. They may or may not know about the different varieties of Thai spoken in different parts of the country or the diversity of ethnic and linguistic backgrounds from which the people come from (Premsrirat this volume). Outsiders may not be aware that a different variety of Thai, ra:-cha:-sàp , is used when Thais talk to or about the King and his family members (Khanittanan this volume).

The history of foreign language education in Thailand until World War II is explored in this article. The research presents an overview of 700 plus years. The findings reveal that three main factors which govern the conditions of foreign language education in Thailand are beliefs, politics, and economics. Target languages change through time but the motivation to study them remains under these three main factors.

Lexical resources in Thai have been increased through the interplay of communicative need, institutional intervention, and popular resolve. This study reviews how the interaction was given cohesion by Prince Wan Waithayakorn (1891–1976), a scholar-bureaucrat whose impact on Thai has been substantial through hundreds of neologisms in common usage. To explain popular uptake of some proposed neologisms but rejection of others, he referred to the “genius of the Thai language.” The study probes this explanation, which may seem odd to contemporary sociolinguists. The linguistic background of “genius of language” is summarized, showing that issues of theoretical weight have been coded by the term. These involve sound, meaning, and morphophonemics. Relevance is indicated for sociolinguistic analysis as well as for typological claims associated with innate parameters. Some themes appear to apply in the Thai case, and the study concludes by pointing to what Prince Wan may have had in mind when he proposed “genius of language” as a Thai sociolinguistic mechanism.

This article examines the unique style shift in news stories in the Thai news media. The language of the headlines is colloquial, casual, familiar, and at times stigmatized, while the language used in the body of the news is formal, formulaic, and pertaining to the written language. The lead is a mixture of both high and low varieties of Thai. Style shift is interpreted as being influenced primarily by inner context, the structure of the news. The shift is set in the structure. The headlines use Low Thai, while High Thai is to be used in the body of the news. Outer contextual features such as audience or speech-act factors do not have any effect on the shift.

Since the 1950s, the relationship between the Chinese in Thailand and their host society was characterized as that of assimilation. The main proponent of this view was William Skinner, and it was subsequently adopted by researchers in the field. However, the thesis of assimilation has been challenged by writers such as Chan Kwok Bun and Tong Chee Kiong, and many would agree that Skinner's thesis no longer prevails. While it is now almost certain that the presumption of assimilation is misguided, language shift has nonetheless taken place. In the present article, the author evaluates the analysis of the factors which an earlier work claims to have contributed to assimilation and language shift (namely the decline of Chinese education, pro-Thai policies, and positive attitudes towards Thai society). In addition, she presents the arguments which have been used to discredit the thesis of assimilation. Finally, taking into account the views of other writers on the subject, she analyzes data from her fieldwork and shows that language shift has occurred.

Based on 1,366 names of districts, subdistricts, villages, and temples in Nan Province, Northern Thailand, this study aims to analyze the meaning of each of the names and formulate general principles of place-name formation in Thai. It is found that folk names are structurally different from official names. A Thai folk place name, such as (farm-salt) ‘salt farm’ and thûŋ-kwaaŋ (field-deer) ‘field full of deer’, is generally composed of a head noun denoting a geographical feature, such as mountain, farm, forest, plain, and field, followed by a modifying word that refers to natural resources, such as salt, rock, teak, sand, animals, and plants, a word that refers to colors, such as ‘yellow’ and ‘white’, or a word referring to directions, such as ‘south’ and ‘north’. Unlike folk names, which reflect natural environments, official place names reflect Thai social values. They normally contain elaborate words borrowed from Pali and Sanskrit that refer to auspicious concepts, such as peace, happiness, development, modernity, and Buddhism; for example, săntiphâap-phátthanaa ‘peace and development’.

Thailand is situated at the heart of Southeast Asia and as such, exhibits all the remarkable characteristics of the region, which is one the most complex areas of language and ethnicity in the world. The 70 languages of Thailand belong to five language families: Tai, Austroasiatic, Hmong-Mien, Sino-Tibetan, and Austronesian. All languages are hierarchically interrelated in Thai society with Standard Thai, the only official language, at the highest level. It is used as a medium of instruction in school and in the mass media all over the country. The ethnic minorities are in diglossic situations. They use their ethnic language at home and in their community and Standard Thai at school and on formal occasions. With rapid changes to the ecology of language caused by global socioeconomics, modern culture, a powerful mass media, and a language policy which supports only the official language, as well as the negative attitude of the speakers towards their own language, ethnic minority languages are declining with the younger generation increasingly becoming monolingual in Standard Thai. At least fourteen languages are now endangered and may not be able to survive to the end of this century. Other languages, with the exception of Standard Thai, are also not safe.

This study has two main objectives: to determine the formation of slang as used in political news and columns in Thai daily newspapers, and to investigate the participants' attitudes towards slang usage. The data for the analysis of slang formation were collected from two newspapers, namely Thai Rath , and Ma-ti Chon , published from January 2004 to April 2006. The other type of data were the answers to a questionnaire administered to 100 participants grouped according to gender, age, and educational level in order to determine their understanding of the tested slang, and their attitudes towards the usage. The findings indicated that most of the slang words and expressions were formed by the process of compounding, followed respectively by single-word forms, and loan blending. Most words functioned as verbs and verb phrases in the sentences, whereas nouns and noun phrases came second. The metaphorical conceptual meanings of slang largely signified war and the related concepts of fighting, killing, weapons, and arguments. Regarding their understanding, it was found that 70.15 percent of the respondents were able to correctly identify the meaning of slang. In terms of appropriateness, the tested slang was moderately rated as appropriate ( = 2:91) in the given contexts. Generally, the majority of the respondents (71.0%) agreed with political slang usage in newspapers.

This article aims to study animate classifiers in six Tai languages, namely, Central Thai, Lao, Tai Lue, Shan, Bouyei, and Northern Zhuang. The focus is on social factors such as register choice, age, kinship, gender, social standing, and social attitudes as determinants of Tai animate classifiers which are further categorized into human and non-human classifiers. The data analysis is based on the work of Li (1977) and the continuum model posited by Conklin (1981). It has been found that in the western languages, that is, Central Thai, Lao, Shan, and Lue, social status and social attitudes are the most important factors in animate classifier usage. In addition to these social factors, Lao and Lue also employ gender and age to determine the animate classifier choice. In the easterly Tai languages, that is, Bouyei and Northern Zhuang, age and kinship are the sociolinguistic determinants of animate classifier usage. This study also reveals that each group of languages has its own classifier development.

Given the forthcoming near certain massive disappearance of languages during the twenty-first century, scholars have tried to identify the causes that are leading this process. Among those given, the number of speakers has been considered one of the most important predictors for the future of a language, and different “safety thresholds” have been proposed. However, examination of several sociolinguistic aspects in a fairly large sample of languages worldwide suggests that there is no direct relationship between the number of speakers and the probabilities of survival of a language. In this article, we will show that the number of speakers cannot be considered the only, not even the most important criterion, when trying to anticipate language survival or death. Instead, natural transmission and intergenerational use are shown to be better predictors. We will use data on more than 525 languages, collected by the Amarauna Languages group of the UNESCO Center in the Basque Country, with the purpose of writing a report on the current sociolinguistic situation of the world languages (Martí et al. 2005).