Language choice in Thai newspapers and magazines

The Thai language has been used as the main language in the domain of newspapers and magazines in Thailand for a long time. However, global changes have brought more important roles of English as a lingua franca in Southeast Asia and worldwide. English has inevitably become increasingly important in Thai society. This brings the question of the influence of English and potential changes in language choice in Thai newspapers and magazines. This paper aims to record the language choice of Thai newspapers and magazines and to make a quantitative comparison between the choice of Thai and English in the two types of media. The results reveal that the language choice of 85.29% of Thai newspapers and 94.23% of Thai magazines is Thai. The findings serve as evidence demonstrating that Thai remains strong as the language choice in Thai newspapers and magazines. However, analyses show that English plays important roles in various components of Thai magazines even though English is not their language choice.