The Thai alphabet: all 44 consonants

The chart below gives all 44 Thai consonants in the traditional order, each with its full name and its class. Before you memorise anything, it is worth knowing what kind of writing system you are looking at, because Thai does several things no European alphabet does, and the chart itself will not tell you any of them. Thai runs left to right, and that is where the resemblance ends. There are no capital letters, so nothing on the page marks a name or the start of a sentence. There is no full stop either — a space does that job. And there are no spaces between words. A line of Thai is an unbroken run of letters, broken only where a phrase ends. This is what defeats people standing in front of a sign: you cannot see where one word stops and the next begins. You find the boundaries by recognising the words, not by looking, which is why the alphabet and the vocabulary have to be learnt together. Consonants are also only half the system. Thai vowels are not letters in the line. They are written around the consonant — after it, before it, above it, below it, and often in two or three of those positions at once. The consequence catches everyone: a vowel written to the left of a consonant is pronounced after it. The country's own name shows it. ไทย is read "thai", and the leading ไ sits in front of ท on the page but follows it in the mouth. The final ย of that word is silent — three letters, two sounds. Inside a syllable you are not reading strictly left to right; you are taking in a cluster and deciding where its edges fall. The vowel chart sets out those positions. Some syllables carry no written vowel at all. คน (khon, person) and นก (nók, bird) are two consonants each, with the vowel understood. Thai spelling assumes you will supply it, which is another reason sounding out letter by letter stalls. Forty-four consonants is a lot of letters for 21 initial sounds. Six of them write "th" — ฐ ฑ ฒ ถ ท ธ. Five write "kh", though two of those five are the obsolete letters described below. Four write "s". Two apiece write "n", "l", "d", "y", "f" and "h" — and ฑ, counted above under "th", is read "d" inside a handful of borrowings such as บัณฑิต, a graduate. The duplicates have two separate explanations, and only the first is about borrowing. The Thai script descends, by way of Khmer, from an Indian one, and Thai has taken a great deal of vocabulary from Sanskrit and Pali, the languages of Indian learning and of Buddhism. Those languages distinguish sounds Thai does not have. Thai kept the extra letters so the loanwords stayed recognisable in writing, and pronounced them with the nearest Thai sound. The sounds merged; the spellings did not. That is why a word containing ฒ or ณ is almost certainly a borrowing. But not every duplicate arrived from India. Some were made in Thailand — the two "f" letters among them, since neither Sanskrit nor Pali had that sound — and many pairs exist so that one sound has both a high-class and a low-class spelling, which is what makes all its tones writable. ข and ค, ผ and พ, ถ and ท, ส and ซ, ฝ and ฟ, ห and ฮ are pairs of that second kind. Two of the 44 are obsolete. ฃ and ฅ fell out of use during the twentieth century, and the words that once took them are now spelt with ข and ค, which sound the same. They stay in the chart because the chart is traditional and complete. In practice you face 42. Every consonant has a two-part name: its sound, then a word that features it, usually as its first letter. ก is gaw gài, after ไก่, a chicken. ม is maw máa, after ม้า, a horse. The name has a job. When six letters all sound "th", saying "th" identifies none of them. So a Thai person spelling a surname over the phone, or a clerk telling you which letter to write on a form, gives the whole name: thaw thá-hǎan for ท, after ทหาร, a soldier, and thaw thong for ธ, after ธง, a flag. Thai children learn each letter with its word attached, never the name as a bare sound. The chart groups the letters by class — 9 mid, 11 high, 24 low. This is the column foreigners skip and the one that matters most. Class cannot be heard: ข and ค are both "kh" and are indistinguishable to the ear, yet one is high and the other low. Class is a spelling category, and its work is fixing the tone of the syllable. Four things decide a Thai syllable's tone together: the class of the initial consonant, the length of the vowel, whether the syllable ends in a stopped sound or an open one, and the tone mark, if there is one. One of those four is the class column of this chart, and a second — whether the syllable ends stopped or open — is decided by another consonant, which is why the chart is grouped by class rather than by sound. A pair shows it. ขา (khǎa, leg) and คา (khaa, to be stuck) have the same consonant sound, the same vowel and no tone mark on either, yet the first is rising and the second mid. A silent ห in front of one of the low-class sonorants — ง ญ ณ น ม ย ร ล ว ฬ, the letters with no high-class partner — even lends it high class, which is why หมา (mǎa, dog) rises where มา (maa, to come) does not. The tone rules are short, but none of them work until class is as automatic as sound. A consonant at the end of a syllable does a different job from one at the start. Thai allows only eight final sounds — -k, -t, -p, -m, -n, -ng, -w and -y — and every letter that can close a syllable collapses into one of them. จ ช ด ต ถ ท ส ศ all end as a plain -t; ญ ณ น ร ล all end as -n. ประเทศ (bprà-thêet, country) finishes with ศ, a letter that is "s" at the front of a word and -t at the back. The mistake here is not identifying the sound but releasing it. English often releases a final t with a small puff of air; Thai never does. รถ (rót, car) ends with the tongue arriving behind the teeth and stopping there, unexploded. Which order should you learn them in? Not the chart order, which is inherited from the Indian arrangement and puts rare letters early. Go by class. Start with the nine mid-class letters: few, mostly common, and the only group in which all five tones can be spelled out with marks. Then the eleven high-class letters, one of which is the obsolete ฃ. That is twenty letters and both small classes complete, after which everything remaining is low class, so class becomes a default rather than a fact to recall each time. Do you need all 44 before you can read? No, but the question hides a trap. Consonants alone will not read a single word, because every word needs a vowel and the vowels are a separate system. Take consonants and the main vowel patterns together, in small batches, and read real words from the first week. Once you are reading real things — a bus destination board, a receipt, the label on a bottle of fish sauce — you no longer choose which letters turn up, and the rare ones arrive inside words you actually needed. How long does it take? The shapes are the fast part. Recalling the class without pausing takes much longer, because there is nothing to recognise — you are retrieving a fact attached to a shape. Expect it to come from reading rather than from the chart. If you would rather work through the system as a sequence than use it as a reference, start with learning to read Thai.