Thai alphabet
อักษรไทย
The Thai alphabet (อักษรไทย, akson thai) is the writing system of Thailand, with 44 consonant letters, 15 vowel symbols that attach above, below, before, or after the consonant, and 4 tone marks. It is an abugida: each consonant carries an inherent vowel ("o" or "a" depending on context) unless an explicit vowel sign overrides it.
All 44 letters
History
The Thai script was created in 1283 CE by King Ramkhamhaeng the Great, who adapted it from the older Khmer script (which itself descends from the Pallava script of southern India, ultimately rooted in the Brahmi family). The famous Ramkhamhaeng Inscription of 1292 — Thailand's earliest extant document in the new script — attributes the invention to the king himself. Thai's most distinctive feature is its tone system: every syllable carries one of five tones (mid, low, falling, high, rising), determined by a combination of the consonant's class (low/mid/high), the vowel length, the syllable-ending sound, and any explicit tone marks. Two consonants — ฃ and ฅ — fell out of use in the early 20th century but are still listed in the canonical alphabet.
Things you might not know
- Thai is written without spaces between words — readers identify word boundaries from context, like classical Greek or Chinese.
- Each consonant is traditionally taught with a mnemonic word: ก ไก่ (ko kai, "ko, chicken"), ข ไข่ (kho khai, "kho, egg"), and so on. Thai children memorize the alphabet song to these word pairs.
- Thai has 44 consonants for only 21 actual consonant sounds — the duplicates exist because they originally represented different sounds in Old Thai or in Sanskrit/Pali loanwords, and they're now distinguished only by tone class.
- Vowels in Thai can appear before, after, above, below, or surrounding the consonant — sometimes a single vowel sound is written with marks on three sides of the consonant at once.