Introduction

Romanization is the process of rendering the sounds or of a foreign language with the letters of a Roman alphabet.

A transliteration system does this with the goal of preserving the mapping between source language characters and output tokens, so that the original script may be accurately reconstructed. Students learning a new language, however, will find a phonemic transcription methodology more useful. The system we've developed for this website uses the familiar English alphabet and assumes a nominal American English pronunciation, while still noting the important Thai language tones. This type of system is called phonemic—as opposed to phonetic—because it does not attempt to distinguish those variations in Thai speech which do not convey meaning.

The Thai-language.com enhanced phonemic transcription system is recommended for all students and is the default setting for transcriptions throughout this web site. However, you can now select an alternate romanization scheme in the site control panel, including IPA phonetic transcription, the Royal Thai General System of transcription, ISO 11940 transliteration, and others.

Examples

Each transcripted syllable on this website is presented in two parts, a phonemic portion and a tone indicator. The phonemic portion is intended to represent the sound of the consonants and vowels present, and the tone indicator represents the tone with which the syllable must be spoken for it to be properly understood.

Phonemic Portion

The phonemic portion is spelled out as an approximation using Latin letters according to a consensus American English pronunciation. The system is documented here: (vowels, consonants)

Tone Indicators

Every syllable in Thai is pronounced in one of five tones: low, mid, high, falling, or rising. In our system, the required tone is indicated with a superscripted capital letter after the syllable.

As you can see, I have opted not to use diacritical marks to indicate the spoken tone. One reason is that those marks have specific meanings in other languages. I feel that the superscript system properly calls more attention to the spoken tones; in my system, a tone is indicated for every syllable, including mid tones.

Square Brackets

Square brackets surround a Thai letter when that letter is marked as silent by the gaaran mark.

In general, this mark indicates that the letter or letters underneath are not pronounced in the proper Thai pronunciation. For more information, refer to the section titled “Silence” on this page.

The brackets are not always shown when the gaaran symbol is present because sometimes the transcription code handles certain special cases in other special ways. For example in the sample word “hamburger” given on that page, the ‘r’ sounds in the phonemic transcription actually come from the vowel, and the ‘r’ character with the gaaran above it does not show up in the transcription in any way.

The reason for including these characters in brackets is because sometimes there’s a hint of the character in the pronunciation. Also, since this often happens in loanwords, you’ll find that educated Thais with a good knowledge of English will often pronounce the word with the bracketed characters sounded.

Long "oh-" Vowel

One exception to the policy of not using unusual marks in the phonemic transcription system is for the long-duration oh- sound represented by the Thai vowel โ. In order to distinguish the long-duration oh- sound from its short-duration variant, the long-duration vowel uses the following phonemic transcription:

Transliteration Errors

Transliterations shown on this web site are generated automatically from the Thai script by a computer program. The algorithm has grown complex over time so that it can handle many of the exceptions in Thai pronunciation, but some of the transliterations may still be incorrect. Please be patient while improvements are made.

When the program suspects that there might be an error, '?' will appear instead of the transliteration. If only the tone cannot be determined, the phonemic portion may be shown with a '?' instead of the superscripted tone mark.

For entries with audio pronounciation, the audio gives the correct pronounciation in any case where there is a difference with the transliteration.

Please feel welcome to submit corrections to erroneous transliterations by using the correction link at the bottom of every dictionary page. However, please realize that transliteration accuracy is a goal which is secondary to our other development activities, such as recording additional new audio clips. Most users agree with this prioritization. I have several ways to adjust individual transliterations:

If your correction can be accomplished within one of the easier of these modes, it has a better chance of being effected in a timely manner.

More Information

In general, transliteration is a haphazard practice which suffers from many pitfalls:

Further complicating matters is the fact that the "phone" or sound of a Thai consonant depends on whether it appears in the beginning ("initial") or ending ("final") position of a syllable. Unsophisticated transliteration systems don't account for this, which is why you sometimes see the Thai greeting สวัสดี transliterated as, "sa was dee" rather than "sa wat dee;" the ส character is pronounced with an 's' as an initial, and with a 't' sound as a final.

In fact, many of the final sounds which are not present in the Thai language, such as '-s' or '-r' seem to be unhearable by some native speakers; to these persons, the sounds are perceptually indistinguishable from other endings which are clearly dissimilar to a English speakers. Of course the converse is true for Westerners encountering certian sonic aspects of Thai.

For these reasons, the author recommends that all students of the Thai language eventually study the Thai alphabet. This is the only way to "bridge" between different tutorial materials and gain a deeper understanding of the language. And it's fun to be able to read simple signs when you're travelling around Thailand, too.

Audio clips for the dictionary entries can go a long way towards eliminating the need for transliteration on a web site such as this one. Nevertheless, I understand the need for transliteration when people are trying to get up to speed quickly. I got a few complaints about the lack of transliterations in an earlier version of this web site.

In keeping with the tradition of proliferating transliteration methodologies, this website uses the system described above. It seems reasonably accurate to me and has the advantage of being internally consistent and well documented. You may wish to note that I was raised on America's east coast, so my decisions reflect this regional pronounciation.

And remember, the best solution is to learn Thai script, which generally indicates an unambiguous pronunciation of a word.