Lao is a Tai language spoken by 7 million people in Laos and 23 million people in northeast Thailand. After the conclusion of the Franco-Siamese conflict of 1893, the Lao-speaking world was politically split at the Mekong River, with the left bank eventually becoming modern Laos and the right bank the Isan region of Thailand (formerly known as Siam prior to 1939). Isan refers to the local development of the Lao language in Thailand, as it diverged in isolation from Laos. The Isan language is still referred to as Lao by native speakers.Keyes, Charles F. (1966). "Ethnic Identity and Loyalty of Villagers in Northeastern Thailand". Asian Survey.
Isan houses the majority of Lao speakers and the affinity of shared culture with Laos is palpable in the food, architecture, music and language of the region. In its purest spoken form, the Isan language is basically the same as Lao spoken in Laos. Using just tone and some lexical items, there are at least twelve distinct speech varieties of Isan, most of which also continue across the Mekong River into Laos. In fact, the different speech varieties on roughly the same latitude tend to have more affinity with each other, despite the international border, than to speech varieties to the north and south. Only a handful of lexical items and grammatical differences exist that differentiate Isan as a whole, mainly as a result of more than a century of political separation between Isan and Laos, but most of these terms were introduced in the 1980s when Isan was better integrated into Thailand's transportation and communication infrastructure.
Comparison of spelling and orthography
Isan and Lao have drifted away from each other mostly in terms of the written language. The Isan people were forced to abandon their traditional Tai Noi script and have come to use the Thai written language, or Isan written in the Thai script, for communication. In Laos, Tai Noi was modified into the modern Lao script, but several spelling changes in the language during the transition from the Lao monarchy to the communist rule moved Thai spelling and Lao spelling of cognate words further apart. Isan, writes all words with Thai cognates as they exist in Thai, with clusters, special letters only found in obscure Sanskrit words and etymological principles that preserve silent letters and numerous exceptions to Thai pronunciation rules although a small handful of Isan words, with no known or very obscure Thai cognates, are spelled more or less the same as they are in Lao.
Lao spelling in Laos was standardized in the opposite direction. Whilst previously written in a mixture of etymological and phonetical spellings, depending on the audience or author, the language underwent several reforms that moved the language towards a purely phonetical spelling. During the restoration of the king of Luang Phrabang as King of Laos under the last years of French rule in Laos, the government standardized the spelling of the Lao language, with movement towards a phonetical spelling with preservation of a semi-etymological spelling for Pali, Sanskrit and French loan words and the addition of archaic letters for words of Pali and Sanskrit origin concerning Indic culture and Buddhism.
Spelling reforms under the communist rule of Laos in 1975 were more radical, with the complete abolition of semi-etymological spelling in favor of phonetical spelling, with the removal of silent letters, removal of special letters for Indic loan words, all vowels being written out implicitly and even the elimination or replacement of the letter ຣ (but usually pronounced ) in official publications, although older people and many in the Lao diaspora continue to use some of the older spelling conventions. The examples demonstrate the differences between Lao and Isan, using Thai orthography, but also that between archaic and modern Lao, as well as the general pronunciation and spelling practices between Standard Thai and Standard Lao in general.Ivarson, S. (2008). Creating Laos: The Making of a Lao Space Between Indochina and Siam, 1860-1945. (pp. 127–135, 190–197) Copenhagen, Denmark: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies.
Silent letters Numerous loan words from other languages, particularly Sanskrit and Pali, have numerous silent letters, sometimes even syllables, that are not pronounced in either Thai, Isan or Lao. In most cases, one of the final consonants in a word, or elsewhere in more recent loans from European languages, will have a special mark written over it (Thai ◌์ / Lao ◌໌), known in Isan as karan (การันต์) and Lao as karan/kalan (ກາລັນ/archaic ກາຣັນຕ໌ ).
In reforms of the Lao language, these silent letters were removed from official spelling, moving the spelling of numerous loan words from etymological to phonetical. For instance, the homophones pronounced are all written in modern Lao as ຈັນ CH-A-N, chan, but these were previously distinguished in writing as ຈັນທ໌ CH-A-N-[TH] or ຈັນທຣ໌ CH-A-N-[TH]-[R], 'moon'; ຈັນທ໌ CH-A-N-[TH] or ຈັນທນ໌ CH-A-N-[TH]-[N], 'sandalwood' and ຈັນ CH-A-N, 'cruel.' In Isan, using Thai etymological spelling, the respective spellings are จันทร์ CH-A-N-[TH]-[R], จันทน์ CH-A-N-[TH]-[N] and จัน, CH-A-N, with the latter being a shared Lao-Isan word with no Thai cognate.
Consonant clusters The oldest texts in the Tai Noi corpus show that the earliest stages of the Lao language had consonant clusters in some native words as well as many loan words from Khmer, Mon, other Austroasiatic languages, Sanskrit and Pali. Although most of these were maintained in Thai pronunciation, these clusters were quickly abandoned, indicating that the Tai dialects that became the Lao language lacked them or that they lost them through separate language development. Unlike the Thai script, Lao preserves a subscript version of /l/ and /r/ ◌ຼ that was commonly used in the ancient Tai Noi script when these clusters were pronounced and written.
Some consonant clusters were maintained in the Lao language for some vocabulary, mostly of Sanskrit and Pali derivation and used in royalty or religious settings, but the most recent spelling reforms in the Lao language removed most of them. The Thai language has preserved all of them, and when Isan is written in Thai, cognates of Thai words are spelled as if they are pronounced in Thai, with consonant clusters that are usually not pronounced in Isan except some religious and technical terms.
Explicit gemination in Lao As consonants may have one value at the start of a consonant and one at the end, occasionally the same letter will be used to end one syllable and begin the next. This remains common in many loan words from Sanskrit and Pali, and was once the case in Lao orthography, but now the different consonant sounds are written out explicitly and no longer implied from older and confusing rules of spelling. Thai, with its etymological spelling, preserves the implied pronunciation of these geminated consonant groupings.
Lao retention of Tai Noi vowel symbols Lao uses two vowel symbols inherited from Tai Noi, one of which ◌ໍ or the nikkhahit (ນິກຄະຫິດ ) is used to denote the vowel in open syllables where that is the final sound in the syllable and the other ◌ົ or mai kon (ໄມ້ກົງ ) which is used to denote the vowel , both of which are sometimes implied in Thai orthography. The latter symbol is also used with some vowels with various meanings. The viram (Archaic ວິຣາມ/ວິລາມ ) was formerly used as a variant of Lao letter ຍ in a word as well as several other uses.
Lao simplification of terminal consonants Both Thai, Lao and Isan only permit the final consonants , , , , , and , with many letters beginning a syllable with one sound and ending a syllable or word with another. Spelling reforms in Laos restricted the final consonants to be spelled ກ, ງ, ດ, ນ, ບ and ມ which correspond to Thai letters ก, ง, ด, น, บ and ม, respectively. As Thai has retained these final consonants according to etymology, this has further moved Lao spelling from Thai and Isan written in Thai in a large number of common words.
Lao vowel reduction The archaic vowels ◌ັຽ and ◌ັມ were replaced with existing vowels ໄ and ຳ as these pairs both represented and , respectively. The Lao vowel ໄ◌ຽ was also replaced by ໄ.
Lao explicit vowels In the abugida systems, open syllables are assumed to have or following them. Modern Lao spelling requires that all vowels are written out, altering the spelling of numerous words and furthering the language from Thai. As this can alter the tone of the words, sometimes tone marks or silent are used to either represent the actual pronunciation of the word or restore it to its original pronunciation.
Lao ligatures Lao uses a silent letter ຫ in front of consonants ງ , ຍ , ນ , ມ , ລ , ຣ or and ວ to move these consonants into the high tone class, used to alter the tone of a word. This is analogous to the use of ห before the equivalent ง , ย (but in Isan, it sometimes represents and also ญ, which is in Central and Southern Thai and represents in Isan), น , ม , ล , ร (generally when in a digraph in Isan) and ว (generally both and in Isan).
As a legacy of the Tai Noi script, Lao writers can use the special ligature ໜ HN instead or, when typesetting or rendering unavailable, it can be optionally be written ຫນ H-N as well as ໝ HM and modern alternative ຫມ. Both ຫລ H-L and ຫຣ H-R have the same ligature form ຫຼ HL/R. Previous versions of the script also had special ligatures ພຽ PHY (ພ + ຍ ) and ຫຽ HY (ຫ + ຍ ) with the latter replaced by ຫຍ HY (high class tone). Former ligatures such as SN and ML have disappeared or were split into syllables as consonant clusters were generally lost or replaced. For example, Archaic Lao ສນອງ SN-O-NG and ມຼາບຼີ ML-A-BR-I have become in the modern language ສະໜອງ S-A-N-O-NG sanong , 'message' (derived from Khmer snaang ស្នង ) and ມະລາບີ M-A-L-A-B-I malabi , approximation of endonym of the Mlabri people. Thai orthography preserves writing the consonants together, although in the modern Thai language these consonants are separated by a vowel according to the current pronunciation rules.
Both Tai Noi and the current Lao alphabet lack equivalents to the Thai vowel ligatures ฤ, ฤๅ, ฦ and ฦๅ, and are mainly used to represent the sounds or , , and , respectively, although the latter two symbols are obsolete in modern Thai. These symbols were used to represent loanwords from Sanskrit ऋ , ॠ , ऌ and ॡ , respectively, but the 2nd and 3rd are rare sounds in Sanskrit; last one doesn't occur in Sanskrit and is only there to match the short-long pairs.
Typographical differences Traditionally, no punctuation exists in either Thai or Lao orthographies, with spaces used to separate lists, sentences and clauses, but otherwise words are written with no spaces between them. A few symbols include the cancellation mark ◌໌ used to mark letters in loan words that are not pronounced, the repetition symbol ໆ used to indicate words or phrases are to be repeated, an ellipsis-like symbol ຯ used to shorten lengthy phrases, such as royal titles or to indicate that following portions have been removed and the equivalent to the et cetera symbol ຯລຯ. These all have equivalents in the Thai script as ◌์, ๆ, ฯ and ฯลฯ.
Other Thai script symbols, such as ๏, used for marking the beginning of texts, lines or stanzas, ๛ to mark the end of chapters, ฯะ to mark the end of stanzas and ๚ to mark the end of sections. These symbols could be combined to provide meaning. A similar system was in use in Laos but was later abolished. The system is mostly archaic in Thai texts, but is still taught as many old texts feature these symbols.
The Lao script only uses two of the tone marks ◌່ and ◌້, although ◌໊ and ◌໋ may occasionally be used to record idiosyncratic or emotional speech, as aids to capture tones of different dialects or onomatopoeia. In the Thai script, the equivalent tone marks are ◌่, ◌้, ◌๊ and ◌๋, respectively.