Thai · ไทย

About Thai

Language family

Kra-Dai, Tai branch

Where it's spoken

Thailand

Speakers

roughly 60–70 million speakers including regional use

Thai is closely related to Lao — the two are largely mutually intelligible in speech even though they use different scripts — and both belong to the wider Tai branch of the Kra-Dai family. Its own script, derived ultimately from a South Indian Brahmi-based writing system via Old Khmer, has no spaces between words and marks five tones essential to meaning. Thailand's history as the only Southeast Asian country never colonized by a European power shaped a writing and court-literature tradition that developed largely on its own terms.