Vowels
Thai has nine vowel phonemes, i.e., sounds that make a difference in word meaning. Vowels can be short or long. Vowel length makes a difference in word meaning. This results in 18 vocalic nuclei which can occur alone or with an initial and final consonant. Long vowels have a duration which is about twice as long as short vowels. In addition, vowels form diphthongs by combining with a semivowel /a/, e.g., /ia/.

xx	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e		o
Low		a

• = similar to vowel in set
• = no equivalent in English
• = a in about
• = similar to vowel in ought

Consonants
There are twenty consonant phonemes, i.e., sounds that make a difference in word meaning. They are listed in the table below.

	xxxx	Bilabial	Labio-dental	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops	unaspirated	p	x	t	c	k - k
	aspirated	p		t	c
Fricatives		xx	f	s	x	x	h
Nasals		m	xx	n	x
Lateral approximant		xxx	xx	l	x
Flap/trill				r	x
Semi-vowel		w	x	xx	y

• Thai does not have a contrast between voiceless and voiced consonants such as betweem p-b, t-d, k-g. Instead, there is a contrast between voiceless unaspirated and voiceless aspirated obstruents, e.g., p-p, t-t, k-k/
• = ng in song.

Tone
Thai is a tonal language in which otherwise identical words can be distinguished by five tones: mid (level), low, falling, high, and rising. The following examples are from Strecker, D. (1990). Tai Languages. In B. Comrie (ed.). The World's Major Languages, pp. 749-775. Oxford University Press.

• Syllables that end in a long vowel, a semi-vowel or a nasal can have all fine tones.
• Syllables that end in a short vowel and a stop or those that have no final consonant have a low or a high tone.
• Syllables with a long vowel followed by a stop usually have a low or a falling tone.

Stress
Linguists generally agree that stress distinguishes between otherwise identical words and that it is most prominent in final position.

Click here to listen to the five tones of Bangkok Thai.

Thai is an analytic language which means that it does not use inflections to represent grammatical relations, such as case, gender, number or tense.

Nouns

• Nouns are not marked for number, gender, or case.
• Thai uses a system of classifiers that follow the numeral and precede the noun, e.g., tua for animals, khone for people, jahn for platefuls, ahn for things in general. There are separate classifiers for different classes of people, objects of different shapes and functions, clothes, foods, animals, etc.
• Possession is expressed by juxtaposion of the object possessed next to possessor, or by a particle.

Pronouns
Thai has a complex system of pronouns. The choice of pronouns in any given situation is determined by the sex, age, social position and the attitude of the speaker towards the addressee. Different pronouns are used in different situations.

• First person
  Thai pronouns for 'I' are different for male and female speakers. In formal settings, men will use phome and women will use dee-chan. However, it is common to drop these formal pronouns in face-to-face conversations or to use kinship terms, such as aunt, uncle, younger/older sibling, or first names instead.
  
• Second person

• Third person

Verbs
Verbs are not inflected for person, number, tense, aspect, or mood. These functions are determined by context or by adverbs and expressions of time.

Particles
Thai has three broad classes of particles that occur at the end of sentences. They are used to express

• Politeness particles express deference towards the addressee. Polite language in Thai requires that a politeness marker be at the end of every phrase. The markers differ according to the gender of the speaker. Men will show deference by ending their questions and statements with khrahp to show respect and refinement. Women end their questions and statements with khah.
• Mood particles express the attitude of the speaker towards the situation at hand, such as urging, persuading, encouraging, etc.
• Different question particles are used in yes-no questions depending on whether the speaker has expectations as to what the answer may be.

Word order
Word order in colloquial Thai varies depending on what is known and what is new information in the sentence. This means that Subject-Verb-Object, Subject-Object-Verb, and Object-Subject-Verb word orders are all possible. In Standard Thai, however, Subject-Verb-Object word order is considered to be the norm. Modifiers follow the nouns they modify.

Historically, Thai has borrowed words from Sanskrit and Pali, particularly religious terms. Chinese has also been an important source of early loans, contributing numerals and a few hundred basic terms. In the modern era, culinary and commercial vocabulary has also entered Thai from Chinese. English has also become an important source of loans especially in the popular cultural sphere, in the mass media, and in commerce. Because of the polysyllabic nature of the large amount of Indic loans, Thai changed from a basic monosyllabic language to one that is now polysyllabic.

The most productive derivational processes in modern Thai are compounding and reduplication. Below are some examples:

• Compounding
  rótfay 'train' from rót 'car' + fay 'fire'.
• Reduplication
  dii 'good', diidii 'rather good', dèk 'child', dèkdèk 'children'

Below are Thai numerals 0-10 in Thai script and in romanization.

0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
soon	nueng	song	sam	see	har	hok	yet	phet	gao	sip

Click here to listen to the pronunciation of these numerals.
Click here to watch short videos in Thai.