Central Thailand is home to diverse populations with the central Thai constituting the major group, while the Mon, who migrated from southern Myanmar, are sparsely distributed within the region. A total of 338 individuals of eight central Thai (246 samples) and three Mon populations (92 samples) were newly genotyped. When
Studies of change across the lifespan have enabled a more nuanced understanding of segmental sound change, but this method has hardly ever been used in tone change research. This study, one of the first longitudinal studies of tone, investigates the tonal contours of King Rama IX of Thailand across a
Thailand and Laos, located in the center of Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA), harbor diverse ethnolinguistic groups encompassing all five language families of MSEA: Tai-Kadai (TK), Austroasiatic (AA), Sino-Tibetan (ST), Hmong-Mien (HM), and Austronesian (AN). Previous genetic studies of Thai/Lao populations have focused almost exclusively on uniparental markers and there is
Moken and Moklen are languages spoken by two of Thailand’s three “Sea Peoples” groups, with speakers located along the coast of the southern Thai peninsula. As one of the few Austronesian subgroups of Mainland Southeast Asia, Moklenic languages serve as an additional example of the linguistic diversity of the region
Language is inextricably linked to daily human life as a social phenomenon. Therefore, social dynamics bring about ongoing linguistic variation. Using traditional and experimental methods, research here aims to look at how the linguistic variation of Southeast Asian languages relates to a dynamic ways of life, attitudes, and societal fluidity.
Tai Ahom (Southwestern Tai) mostly survives in manuscripts. (Terwiel 1988; Morey 2015). It has long been held that Ahom retained many archaic features lost in most modern Tai languages. For example, Li (1977: 87-89) reconstructs the cluster *phr- as evidence from Ahom in words like phra ‘rock’ and phrai ‘walk’.
In this paper, we present a statistical and machine learning approach to the acoustic discrimination of a cross-linguistically unusual phonological contrast, initial geminates vs. singletons in Pattani Malay. We show that the only statistically significant difference between geminates and singletons is the duration of the consonant itself. No differences in
In an attempt to study the length distinction of high vowels in Sukhothai Thai, this research compares an analysis of the graphemic system and spelling variations found in the Sukhothai inscriptions with the phonemes in Proto-Southwestern Tai (PSWT) and donor languages of the loanwords. The result indicates that short and
The existence of several SNS (social networking service) such as Twitter accelerates the diffusion process of language change. In this paper, we examine the diffusion of the innovative verbal usage of nok in Thai Twitter. We collected more than 25 millions tweets and adopted not only word frequency but also three probabilistic measures of analysis: conditional probability, PMI and cosine similarity of word embeddings. The result of these three probabilistic measures show the stability of the innovation regardless of decrease of word frequency. These facts support the idea that the innovation nok is lexically established in Thai language. Most importantly, it shows that the three probabilistic measures can be used to quantify diffusion of linguistic innovation regardless of its polysemy.
In present-day Thai, contour tones show a more restricted distribution in comparison with level tones that cannot be explained by syllable structure alone. This diachronic study argues that both quantitative and qualitative restrictions are responsible for the puzzling gaps and accounts for them by positing Optimality-Theoretic constraints. In addition, it
