The vowels of the Thai language can be intimidating at first, especially when students learn that there are at least 32 vowels, diphthong, and triphthong combinations. But many of the combinations make sense once you get the hang of it and the system can be mastered with a little dedication.

In Thai, each vowel is pronounced with either a short or a long duration. We'll divide our study according to this primary characteristic. But first, please note that in English the terms short and long (when speaking of vowels) refer to the vocal quality or sound of the vowel, whereas in Thai these terms will be describing how the duration changes (while the sound stays the same). Vowel duration does not impart meaning in English; for example, you can say, "ball" quickly or draw out the vowel, "baaaaaaall", and the word still has the same meaning. So, while Thai vowel sounds are much less variable than in English (consider how the 'a' sound is very different in the following English words: cat, father, mate) students will have to learn to pay attention to vowel durations when speaking Thai.

On this page, we'll be simultaneously documenting the vowel portion of the phonemic transcription method which is used throughout thai-language.com. As mentioned in the description of our phonemic transcription system, there is unfortunately no standardized romanization scheme for Thai, and many different schemes are in use by different Western texts. These schemes are complicated by the fact that American, Australian, British, Canadian, and other pronunciations of English differ greatly. In keeping with this tradition, we use a system on this site which seems most accurate to us—and we document it here. You may wish to note that the author was raised on America's east coast.

Of course the best solution is to learn Thai script, which generally indicates an unambiguous pronunciation of a word. And use the Thai audio clips (if available), rather than the phonemic transcription to guide your pronounciation. Note that our native Thai speakers who recorded on these audio clips sometimes speak very slowly for maximum clarity, so it can be difficult to tell the difference between the short and the long vowels.

More information on our phonemic transcription system is available here.

We've decided not to include "as-in" example English words for each of the vowel sounds, for the following two reasons:

Initial-position and final-position consonant transcriptions are given on the alphabetical listing of consonants. Vowel and diphthong transcriptions a re given in the following chart. Our vowel transcriptions have now been adjusted so that any long vowel sound will always contain two adjacent, identical English vowels, except in the following cases:

In addition to having long and short forms, each basic vowel sound can appear in an open or closed syllable. This means simply whether the vowel finishes (i.e. completes) the sound (open) or there is a final consonant tacked on (closed). Now we can proceed to the table of basic vowel sounds. Each of the basic sounds is shown for all four possible combinations: short-closed, short-open, long-closed, and long-open. The second line of each sound shows an example Thai word for that case; of course you can click on that word to go to the dictionary entry, or 'hover' your mouse to see a pop-up definition (if enabled in your site control panel).

1. This can usually be thought of as a double consonant with the simple open vowel -า. In our system, the transcription works out the same, but treating as a diphthong permits some additional cases beyond the allowable double-consonant pairings.

2. This can usually be thought of as a double consonant with the simple closed vowel -า- and final consonant ย. Our auto-transcription prefers that route and so most words will have transcription '-waay'

3. Most short/open vowels generate a dead syllable, however the short/open vowels marked (3.) are treated as a live consonant ending for the purposes of the tone rules.

4. Acts as a low-class consonant.

5. Can also be used in a closed form for certain foreign loan words: เทอม, เยอรมัน, เยอรมนี.

6. Please contact us if you know of another example word.

7. Only appears in the example word shown, and is not really so much a word as it is a sound.

8. In a high-tone syllable (i.e. low-consonant class and ไม้โท  tone mark), this vowel sound may be pronounced short when followed by at least one syllable in compound words and long when alone or in final position.

9. When the ไม้เอก  tone mark appears in a live syllable with แ-- and a mid- or high-class initial, the syllable has a short vowel sound. Examples: แต่ง, แห่ง, แกว่ง.

10. When any tone mark appears with เ--, or in some rare cases, such as เพชร, the syllable has a short vowel sound. Our transcription scheme makes a distinction on this basis; both open and closed syllables with a tone mark are transliterated with -eh(-) rather than -aeh- or -aeh.

11. Some words using -ิ are pronounced with short -ee. For example, หิมะ  /heeL maH/. In fact, even in cases where our transcription is /-i/ (as in the English word 'hit'), the sound is better approximated as somwhere between /-i/ and /-ee/.