Northern Thai vs Central Thai

[Artful Dodger]

Hi,

 

I'm new around here as you can see. I'm hoping to spend quite a bit of time in / around Chiang Mai over the next few years, so I'm going to need to learn Thai. I'm starting pretty much from scratch.

 

On a previous trip to Laos, I did quite a bit of study before going out, only to find that the tones where I was were different from the standard tones that I had learned. I don't mean they were slightly different versions of the same tone - more like a different tonal system. This meant that a lot of the effort I'd put in went to waste.

 

Obviously, I'd rather not make the same mistake twice. According to Wikipedia, the Chiang Mai accent has 6 tones instead of 5, so it sounds like that could happen.

 

It's not so easy to find a teacher from Chiang Mai who can teach in the evenings, UK time, via Skype. In any case, I'm not sure I want a Chiang Mai accent - it's just that I want to be sure I will be able to understand people aroudn there.

 

Should I be looking for someone from the north, or should I just look for a good teacher regardless of where they are from? I'd be grateful for any advice!

 

TAD

[carlyai]

In my distorted opinion, if you have a command of Central Thai you should be able to communicate where ever you go in Thailand. 

I think one of the troubles with learning a language is that you don't have a command of much of the vocabulary, and the confidence. This means you don't make long sentences.

 

If you know Central Thai, and you can explain or ask in long sentences, then, even if your tones are a bit off, people will understand.

 

Look up AUA in Bangkok or Chiang Mai, they used to be great places to learn Thai.

 

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EDITED by @KhunBENQ:

moved text out of "self" quote

 

[carlyai]

Sorry, had some storm and posting problems.

Sent from my SM-J700F using Thailand Forum - Thaivisa mobile app

[futsukayoi]

While I was in Chiang Mai I did a few classes with Effective Foreign Languages Chiang Mai and then followed up with some extra Skype classes.  They are not the cheapest options but have extremely experienced and well qualified teachers.  In any case my views would probably apply to other tutors in Chiang Mai.  What they teach is standard Central Thai.  They may have learned Northern Thai or Chiang Mai dialect at home but are totally fluent in Central Thai (as are most Thais from any region these days).  In fact I find their pronunciation tends to be more clear and textbook correct than much of the rest of the country. 

[KhunBENQ]

 

4 hours ago, carlyai said:

Sorry, had some storm and posting problems.

Sent from my SM-J700F using Thailand Forum - Thaivisa mobile app
 

Cleaned up.

[Artful Dodger]

Thanks guys. I will just find the best teacher I can then, regardless of accent etc.

[Johpa]

You want to learn Central Thai and not Kham Muang (Northern Thai). If you happen to settle in the north then you can slowly learn some words and phrases in Kham Muang. But everyone understands Central Thai and fewer and fewer people speak Kham Muang outside the rural areas. 

 

You probably don't want to become like me speaking mostly Central Thai with a mix of Kham Muang words thrown in because I never learned the correct Central Thai word. Let us just say I don't get the most respect from Central Thai speakers when that happens or when I have to ask about some common Central Thai word.  This happened on my last visit regarding the word "สัปดาห์" (week) a word I last heard in my Thai language class back in the 1980s but never heard up north in conversation during the intervening decades.

[carlyai]

Thanks for the refresher. [emoji3] I think I've heard this word a few times now you mention it.

I'm sure I would have thought someone hurt their eyes, but I'll have to listen to the context more closely.

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[Artful Dodger]

5 hours ago, Johpa said:

You want to learn Central Thai and not Kham Muang (Northern Thai). If you happen to settle in the north then you can slowly learn some words and phrases in Kham Muang. But everyone understands Central Thai and fewer and fewer people speak Kham Muang outside the rural areas. 

 

You probably don't want to become like me speaking mostly Central Thai with a mix of Kham Muang words thrown in because I never learned the correct Central Thai word. Let us just say I don't get the most respect from Central Thai speakers when that happens or when I have to ask about some common Central Thai word.  This happened on my last visit regarding the word "สัปดาห์" (week) a word I last heard in my Thai language class back in the 1980s but never heard up north in conversation during the intervening decades.

OK well that settles it then, thanks.

 

I get that everyone understands Central Thai - my worry was around whether I would understand them. Imagine a Thai who learns English from someone in Surrey on Skype, then goes to Glasgow. Sure the locals will understand him, but the only thing he is going to understand is that he is being laughed at...

[naboo]

Kham Muang is a separate language to Thai, virtually the same as Laos and is the original language of Northern Vietnam. To say that it is an accent or dialect is just wrong (a myth perpetuated by those wishing to create a "One Nation" feeling). Older people in rural areas may only speak Kham Muang and will not understand Thai, conversation they have with only Thai speakers simply do not work. That's not to say there is no overlap with Thai, it just is very different.

 

For example:

 

Ai sorp oo kham muang jaht nuk. Meuan jai gor

I like speaking Northern Thai a lot. Its fun, isn't it!

 

However, the OP need not worry, unless he's going out into deepest darkest villages, though he's more likely to meet someone speaking one of the other 20 or so languages spoken in the mountains.

[islandgirljenny]

On 5/16/2017 at 8:02 AM, Johpa said:

Let us just say I don't get the most respect from Central Thai speakers when that happens or when I have to ask about some common Central Thai word.  This happened on my last visit regarding the word "สัปดาห์" (week) a word I last heard in my Thai language class back in the 1980s but never heard up north in conversation during the intervening decades.

The problem with the word "สัปดาห์" (sapdaa, "week)" is not that it's central rather than northern--it's just fancy/semi-formal Thai because it's a loan word from Sanskrit (or Pali).  You won't hear it in ordinary conversation, but it's used a lot in radio and TV broadcasts and it's also common in newspapers so it's a useful word to know.  

 

Ditto for สุนัข (sunak) vs. หมา (maa), both meaning "dog"--there are lots of these formal/informal pairs in Thai.  Fun or annoying depending on your perspective!

Edited May 22, 2017 by islandgirljenny

[Johpa]

On 5/21/2017 at 8:41 PM, islandgirljenny said:

The problem with the word "สัปดาห์" (sapdaa, "week)" is not that it's central rather than northern--it's just fancy/semi-formal Thai because it's a loan word from Sanskrit (or Pali).  You won't hear it in ordinary conversation, but it's used a lot in radio and TV broadcasts and it's also common in newspapers so it's a useful word to know. 

I actually know a few people who use this formal language in everyday speech. There is another Hi-So group in Thailand apart from the social climbers, mostly families from the Sakdina era who may or may not have great wealth but who retain high standards of social etiquette in both speech and dress. I had one friend who used the term รับประทานอาหาร in front of me and noticed that I took pause to parse the phrase, a loss of face on my part.

[Aforek]

1 hour ago, Johpa said:

รับประทานอาหาร 

รับประทานอาหาร , I found it several times in reading, it's a polite expression

[carlyai]

รับประทานอาหาร , I found it several times in reading, it's a polite expression

When I learnt the Thai language, that's the words we were taught.

Also 'sunuk' for dog, much better than 'mar, mar, mar or mar'.
There again, tones ain't my strong point.

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[Richard W]

The Chiang Mai Kam Mueang phonetic tones seems to have been adjusted towards  Bangkok Thai, though how well they're following its changes I don't know.  I suggest you study some Gedney boxes to know what you should be hearing -  http://thaiarc.tu.ac.th/dialect/ is a nice resource on native Thai dialects in general.  Unfortunately, the sound clips are missing.  The big tonal mismatches are C1-3 (the sixth tone), D1S (natively described as rising) and that A2 (live, voiceless unaspirated) is like A1 in Kam Mueang, not like A4 as in Siamese.

 

The big difference with consonants is that words in A4, B4, C4, D4 mostly have unaspirated voiceless stops  in Kam Mueang, but voiceless aspirated stops in Siamese, as in NT [M]kam v. Siamese [M]kham 'word'.  If you know Lao, you've got a lot of the ordinary vocabulary differences covered.

[jak2002003]

On ‎16‎/‎05‎/‎2017 at 8:02 AM, Johpa said:

You want to learn Central Thai and not Kham Muang (Northern Thai). If you happen to settle in the north then you can slowly learn some words and phrases in Kham Muang. But everyone understands Central Thai and fewer and fewer people speak Kham Muang outside the rural areas. 

 

You probably don't want to become like me speaking mostly Central Thai with a mix of Kham Muang words thrown in because I never learned the correct Central Thai word. Let us just say I don't get the most respect from Central Thai speakers when that happens or when I have to ask about some common Central Thai word.  This happened on my last visit regarding the word "สัปดาห์" (week) a word I last heard in my Thai language class back in the 1980s but never heard up north in conversation during the intervening decades.

You sound like me!  I was forever getting the my Thai teacher angry when I kept putting Northern words into my Thai sentences.... she thought I was doing it to be funny... and the class got really confused... but I really thought they were Thai words!!!

 

I have also met several elderly Thai people here in my village that can not speak Central Thai at all..

 

The North language is totally different to the Central.... OP... its not different tones!!!!  Kind of like English and Welsh instead.

 

But, you want to learn the standard central Thai language... because you will be able to speak it all over Thailand, and most Thai people in the North understand it 100 percent anyway. 

 

The poster saying about Thai people he knows speaking formally... that is weird, and to me it would seem very impolite or off hand.. like they were trying to prove a point about something... it is not normal at all in everyday situations.  Don't be confused thinking formal language means polite language.  Formal language is reserved for formal situations for a reason. 

Edited May 27, 2017 by jak2002003

[Richard W]

7 hours ago, jak2002003 said:

The North language is totally different to the Central.... OP... its not different tones!!!!  Kind of like English and Welsh instead.

English and Scots would probably be a better example.

 

Some words, such as reasonably polite pronouns and final particles, are often unrelated.  However, there is enough cognate vocabulary to generally get the gist of what is being said in sentences of reasonable length.  It helps that much Nuea is heavily loaded with Siamese loanwords - Johpa Junior might well be very hard to understand.

 

I forgot one other very noticeable change - old /r/ has become /h/ or /l/, following the same rules as Lao.  There's also the equivalent of the Lao distinction between nyo nyung and yo ya, though to my ears my wife has gone a long way towards getting rid of it.  (I can hear the difference in my brother-in-law's speech.)

 

 

[Chou Anou]

The few times I've been in Chiang Mai and Lampang, I've understood the language quite well due to my knowledge of Lao (though I certainly can't speak Kham Mueang)...in fact, the dialect of Lao spoken in Luang Prabang sounds, in many ways, closer to the Kham Mueang you hear in northern Thailand than the Lao you hear in the rest of the country.  Also, of course, Lanna script and ancient Lao Tham script (still studied by monks in Laos) are extremely close to each other.

[Richard W]

A measure of the similarity of vocabulary can be got from my annotation of the Peace Corps Dictionary  (now at http://wrdingham.co.uk/lanna/peace_corps_dictionary.pdf). The vocabulary and examples expand to about 137 pages, but adding a glossary (with pronunciation, but no examples) for words in the examples  that needed no explanation because they were sufficiently close to standard Thai adds nearly another 63 pages.

[Artful Dodger]

On 2017-5-27 at 1:14 AM, Richard W said:

... The big tonal mismatches are C1-3 (the sixth tone), D1S (natively described as rising) and that A2 (live, voiceless unaspirated) is like A1 in Kam Mueang, not like A4 as in Siamese.

 

The big difference with consonants is that words in A4, B4, C4, D4 mostly have unaspirated voiceless stops  in Kam Mueang, but voiceless aspirated stops in Siamese, as in NT [M]kam v. Siamese [M]kham 'word'...

Thanks, that's really useful. In the meantime I had found some research by Kirk Person (search for "A Comparative Study of Tones in the Kammuang of Lampang and Chiang Rai") which comes to pretty much the same conclusions on the tonal differences. It also suggests that C4 may be a third variety of falling tone which differs from both B4 and C1-3.

 

I am having Skype lessons now and my teacher says that gin has a rising tone in the north, which doesn't seem to fit (I think it is still gor gai - she is not saying that gin becomes khin). Unless I have misunderstood gor gai goes in row 3 because it is glottal.

 

 

[Richard W]

17 hours ago, Artful Dodger said:

I am having Skype lessons now and my teacher says that gin has a rising tone in the north, which doesn't seem to fit (I think it is still gor gai - she is not saying that gin becomes khin). Unless I have misunderstood gor gai goes in row 3 because it is glottal.

'Gor gai'  is voiceless (i.e. [k]) just like po pla (as in [R]paa 'fish'), and so A2, unlike bo bai mai which is A3, i.e. "glottal or anciently preglottalised".  Few Tai dialects are reported to have /g/.  (Some do have /g/, such as Narathiwat - Malay substrate , and the Tai Viet script caters for /g/.)

 

Chiang Rai tones are different to Chiang Mai tones.  Tones vary quite a bit, just like English vowels do.

[Artful Dodger]

14 hours ago, Richard W said:

'Gor gai'  is voiceless (i.e. [k]) just like po pla (as in [R]paa 'fish'), and so A2, unlike bo bai mai which is A3, i.e. "glottal or anciently preglottalised".  Few Tai dialects are reported to have /g/.  (Some do have /g/, such as Narathiwat - Malay substrate , and the Tai Viet script caters for /g/.)

Interesting. Besides my teacher I only have YT etc. to go on - it's not as though I am hearing Thai all the time. Even so, while gor gai is not the same as English g, I certainly thought I was hearing a g and not a k. Wanting to check this, I came across the dry-but-nonetheless-helpful video below. For me the sound the teacher is making (around the 1:00 mark) is a g.

 

 

I would also have said it was voiced, which may just be another way of saying it is g rather than k - I'm not sure. Something is vibrating at a definite pitch, and if it's not the vocal cords then I don't know what it could be. Maybe the term "voiced" has a technical definition I'm not aware of.

 

15 hours ago, Richard W said:

Chiang Rai tones are different to Chiang Mai tones.  Tones vary quite a bit, just like English vowels do.

Yes, despite the title the paper I mentioned is a four-way comparison between Chiang Rai, Lampang, Chiang Mai and Bangkok. It concludes that Chiang Rai and Lampang have essentially the same system of tones, but Chiang Mai's is more like Bangkok's.

 

I can see that a given tone could have a different contour in different places and still be recognisably the same tone. I'm not too bothered by that - it's more like an accent than anything else. It's the cases where it's not just a different version of the same tone but a different tone altogether - which the Gedney boxes bring out very well - that I am really interested in.
 

 

[Richard W]

10 hours ago, Artful Dodger said:

I would also have said it was voiced, which may just be another way of saying it is g rather than k - I'm not sure. Something is vibrating at a definite pitch, and if it's not the vocal cords then I don't know what it could be. Maybe the term "voiced" has a technical definition I'm not aware of.

I think all her nominally voiceless stops sound a bit voiced. The technical answer is that it is a matter of voicing onset time, and I would say that her voicing starts generally slightly earlier than usual.  Her ก and จ are not as voiced as her ด and บ, and of course language is all about contrasts.