Tongue Thai’d Translations

One of the first things you’ll hear when spoken to by someone from Southern Thailand is…Well, you probably won’t hear it, because they speak so fast. Southern Thais have such a reputation for the rapidity with which they speak that many Thais from other regions struggle to understand them for that reason alone. Added to this are the facts that words are often spoken with different tones than they would be in Central Thai (in some areas of the South seven tones are used), and that there are a number of vocabulary differences, in part due to influences from Malay.

Southern Thai can be broadly divided into three regions. Southeastern Thai is spoken in Nakhon Sri Thammarat, Phattalung, Songkhla, parts of Pattani, Satun, and, despite not being in the Southeast, Trang. The pronunciation of Southeastern Thai can be distinguished by the fact that the ‘g’ sound (kor kai - ก.ไก่) is clearly articulated.

In Krabi, Phang Nga, Surat Thani and Chumporn, which belong in dialect (if not necessarily geography) to the southwestern group, the sound kor kai is absent, so that dork mai (‘flower’) becomes do mai, sam yaek (‘three-way intersection’) is sam yae, and so on.

Finally, in parts of Pattani, Narathiwat and the northernmost provinces of Malaysia, the dialect is known as je he (เจ๊ะเห) or the Tak Bai dialect. Particularly incomprehensible to outsiders, even to other Southerners, je he is thought to have been directly influeced by the language spoken in the former Kingdom of Sukhothai, possibly due to having been ruled by Sukhothai in the distant past.

Although generally written in Thai script, Southern Thai is sometimes written in yawi, an Arabic-inspired script used to write the Malay language, and is thus often found in religious (Muslim) settings.