Thai in Transition  Here are some of the questions that we are exploring.

Do foreign loans have any discernible impact on Thai syntax or grammar? Apparently not.  This is the general case in language innovation worldwide - new terms are incorporated into existing grammatical structures.  The last time that Thai appears to have undergone a dramatic structural change would appear to date to the earliest Ayutthya period, when Khmer language and social contact made signficant changes (see Kanchana1962Study, Huffman73Thai, brown1976thai, Huffman1986Khmer, Wilaiwan2001Khmero-Thai).

What phonological nativization processes serve to 'Thai-ize' loans? For the past thousand years, Thai speakers have used several phonological processes to make words their own, including:

-   reducing final consonants to the eight allowable Thai possibilities;

-   realizing the unwritten vowel as /o/, regardless of its original pronunciation;

-   reducing, or inserting an unstressed vowel in, consonant clusters;

-   assigning a characteristic high-rising tone (Gandour1974Note, Bickner1996Thai)

-   dropping syllables (is this a more recent phenomenon?).

These processes are alive and well.  The Thai lexicon will continue to grow, as it has in the past when Khmer, Indic, and Chinese words entered the vocabulary in great numbers, but it will remain distinctively Thai, and generally incomprensible to native speakers of the source langauges.

What semantic changes are involved in nativization? Word meanings change both by design, and by accident.  Many words created in the heyday of the Royal Institute's word-coining committee intentionally used alternative Indic forms, varying vowel grade and Sanskrit or Pali origin, to specify distinctive Thai meanings (Chris Court's desynonymization process). See wan1970coining, court1984some.

Today, we can track the divergent uses of English loanwords like 'mouth' (used as a verb meaning 'talk, gossip'), 'pretty' (used in noun form as a job category, esp. for product demonstrators) and 'jam' (stripped of musical associations, and applied to any enjoyable group effort).  The fluid transition between grammatical categories is, of course, characteristic of Thai words and should come as no surprise.

How effective is the Royal Institute's prescriptive orthography for slang and loans? The complex Thai script sets the stage for conservative orthography that preserves foreign word origins.  In modern Thai, two tone markers (3 and 4) appear to be particularly strong markers of Chinese loans (particularly in the Bangkok era), and of modern slang.  However, there seems to be some resistance to using such tone marking to stamp English loans.  We found that despite continued phonological nativization, Thais often write such words without tone markers.

Are there any characteristic phonological processes that tend to generate new slang?

Does the distribution of slang characterize Thai Web space, or the slang itself?

Can dictionaries developed without text corpora hope to get it right? Not a chance.

what semantic niches do foreign borrowings fill?

what is the grammatical distribution of new and borrowed words?

how widely used are suggested 'traditional Thai' alternatives?

What is the role of Thailand's Royal Institute? Like similar institutions around the world, the Royal Institute has a task that is simultaneously progressive and reactionary, essential and hopeless.  It has been enormously successful in language innovation, and the RI's many specialized dictionaries play an essential role in Thailand's modernization.  See court, wan ... .

But it has been equally unsuccessful in language regulation.  One attempt we have studied, Foreign Words That Can be Replaced with Thai Words (RI, 2006) shows why.  The term "jet set" is given the alternative "..." This is not simply awkward; rather, it overlooks the fact that "jet set" has the alliterative, reduplicative appeal that has characterized Thai innovation for centuries.