- published: 27 May 2011
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Thai (ภาษาไทย Phasa Thai[pʰāːsǎː tʰāj] ( listen)), more precisely Central Thai or Siamese, is the national and official language of Thailand and the native language of the Thai people, Thailand's dominant ethnic group. Thai is a member of the Tai group of the Tai–Kadai language family. Some words in Thai are borrowed from Pali, Sanskrit and Old Khmer. It is a tonal and analytic language. Thai also has a complex orthography and relational markers.[citation needed] Thai is mutually intelligible with Lao.
Thai is the official language of Thailand, spoken by over 20 million people (2000),Standard Thai is based on the register of the educated classes of Bangkok.Khorat Thai is spoken by about 400,000 (1984) in Nakhon Ratchasima; it occupies a linguistic position somewhere between Siamese Thai and Isan on a dialect continuum, and may be considered a variant of either. A majority of the people in the Isan region of Thailand speak a dialect of the Lao language, which has influenced the Siamese Thai dialect.[citation needed]