Romanization of Thai
Romanization of Thai
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Romanization of Thai

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Romanization of Thai

There are many systems for the romanization of the Thai language, i.e. representing the language in Latin script. These include systems of transliteration, and transcription. The most seen system in public space is Royal Thai General System of Transcription (RTGS)—the official scheme promulgated by the Royal Thai Institute. It is based on spoken Thai, but disregards tone, vowel length and a few minor sound distinctions.

The international standard ISO 11940 is a transliteration system, preserving all aspects of written Thai adding diacritics to the Roman letters. Its extension ISO 11940-2 defines a simplified transcription reflecting the spoken language. It is almost identical to RTGS. Libraries in English-speaking countries use the ALA-LC Romanization.

In practice, often non-standard and inconsistent romanizations are used, especially for proper nouns and personal names. This is reflected, for example, in the name Suvarnabhumi Airport, which is spelled based on direct transliteration of the name's Sanskrit root. Language learning books often use their own proprietary systems, none of which are used in Thai public space.

An international standard, ISO 11940, was devised with transliteration in academic context as one of its main goals.

It is based on Thai orthography, and defines a reversible transliteration by means of adding a host of diacritics to the Latin letters. The result bears little resemblance to the pronunciation of the words and is hardly ever seen in public space.

Some scholars use the Cœdès system for Thai transliteration defined by George Cœdès (1886–1969), in the version published by his student Uraisi Varasarin. In this system, the same transliteration is proposed for Thai and Khmer whenever possible.

The Royal Thai System of Transcription, usually referred to as RTGS uses only unadorned Roman letters to reflect spoken Thai. It does not indicate tone and vowel length. Furthermore it merges International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) /o/ and /ɔ/ into ⟨o⟩ and IPA /tɕ/ and /tɕʰ/ into ⟨ch⟩. This system is widely used in Thailand, especially for road signs.

The ISO standard ISO 11940-2 defines a set of rules to transform the result of ISO 11940 into a simplified transcription. In the process, it rearranges the letters to correspond to Thai pronunciation, but it discards information about vowel length and syllable tone and the distinction between IPA /o/ and /ɔ/.

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