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Thailand English Dialect Group 2 Baludi Bahian Castillo Galinada Oponda Porras Quintanilla
Thailand English Dialect Group 2 Baludi Bahian Castillo Galinada Oponda Porras Quintanilla
Thailand English Dialect Group 2 Baludi Bahian Castillo Galinada Oponda Porras Quintanilla
;
Oponda, Claire; Porras, Marlou; Quintanilla, Verte Mae N.
ENG 102, 29C
November 20, 2020
Although many Thais can speak some English, understanding them, can often
still prove difficult. This is because, especially among those with a limited education, Thai
phrases are often translated word for word into English and they pronounced it in a
uniquely Thai way.
Phonological Features
The sound and tone of phrases and words is very important when considering the
Thai Language. Native Thai words are characterized by their monosyllabic nature with a
number of words derived from Pali and Sanskrit.
Complications in English pronunciation can be encountered by Thai learners of
English due to variations in language structure, and confusion when converting specific
tonal sounds related to the consonants /l/, /r/ /w/, and /v/. Stress is sometimes placed on
the final syllable of nouns.
Example: University is pronounced as /uːnɪwəːsɪˈti/.
In terms of vowels, Thai vowels are comparable to English vowels, but one major
difference exist with regards to length of vowel production where "laxness and tenseness
are relevant for English".Tsukada (2008,2009) Thai Speakers produce distinctively
shorter monophthongs than Australian speakers, and that /εI/ and /oY/ are often equated
by Thai speakers with the Thai long vowels /ε:/ and /o:/
With consonants, Trakulkasemsuk (2012) notes that the consonants /tʃ/, /dӡ/, /θ/,
/ð/, /ʃ/, and /ӡ/ do not exist in Thai. Instead they tend to substitute these with the closest
consonants in their Thai consonant inventory, where, for example, /tʃ/, /ʃ/, and /ӡ/ are often
approximated to the Thai /tɕʰ/. The consonant /dӡ/ in English is often replaced by /tɕ/,
while /ð/ is substituted by /d/, and /θ/ by /t/, /tʰ/, or /s/. Finally, the /v/ consonant in English
is pronounced as /w/ like university that pronounced as /uːnɪwəːsɪˈti/, while the English
consonant /z/ is closest to /s/ in Thai, resulting in a lack of distinction between minimal
pairs like vest and west and rice and rise (Trakulkasemsuk, 2012).
Lexical Features
Syntactic Features
Salient syntactic features of Thai English include: subject less constructions; tense
and subject‐verb agreement; plural marking; and aspects of word order. Chutisilp (1984)
provides a comprehensive analysis of subject less constructions and concludes that the
omission of subjects occurs in various types of sentences, including (i) affirmative
utterances, as in (I) watch movie; (ii) negative utterances, as in (I) not go to university;
and (iii) interrogatives, as in (Are you) coming? It is normal in the Thai language to omit
the subject of a sentence where the meaning of the omitted word is understood from the
context.Pechapan (2007) noted a similar pattern of subject omission among the
affirmative statements made in an English guided‐tour commentary by a Thai tour guide.
Examples are shown below:
1. [The Buddha image] Come from the Indonesia in the reign of King Rama
the Fifth.
2. [He] Offer the four Buddha image to the King Rama the Fifth
Both subject‐verb agreement and verb inflection do not exist in Thai, which helps to
explain examples below:
1. He swim in the canal near his home yesterday.
2. If I know about your problem, I will not criticize you at the meeting
yesterday.
Accordingly, Thailand and Thai English are very much aligned with Bolton’s (2003)
view that speakers “of English seem to be developing their own styles of speech and
writing that are used to communicate about the realities of their own societies and
cultures”. This can be notified in some word order of Thai English as exemplified by the
sign on many Bangkok taxis that reads taxi meter (rather than meter taxi), and in such
phrases as movie cowboy (‘cowboy movie’), a form online (instead of an ‘online form’), a
game computer (instead of a ‘computer game’), and padthai vegetable (‘vegetarian
padthai’).
Discourse Features
Thais, as Expanding Circle users, are greatly influenced by the unique cultural
context of their society when they express themselves in written English. Chutisilp (1984)
lists a number of distinctive patterns of Thai English written discourse, asserting that (i)
sentences in Thai English are often lengthy, incoherent, and unconnected; (ii) Thais
frequently write one‐sentence paragraphs with many modifiers; (iii) Thai English appears
to be spiral, redundant, and wordy, rather than direct and to the point; and (iv) Thai writers
in English often attempt to employ a sophisticated mode of expression, which all too often
results in an unnecessarily inflated style of language. Other structural features associated
with this type of writing can be exemplified by the use of the conjunctions ‘although …
but’ and ‘because … so’ in sentences such as: