Thai
Thai script is used primarily to write the Thai language, and minority languages in Thailand, including Isan, Southern Thai and Northern Thai. It is also used to write Pali and Sanskrit, the scriptural languages of Theravada Buddhism. The script is ultimately descended from the Pallava script of South India, via an ancient form of the Khmer script. It is also closely related to the Lao script. Unlike most other Brahmic scripts, there are no independent vowel letters, and no conjuncts representing consonant clusters. Tone markers represent the tonal system of the Thai language. Tone and vowel diacritics are often stacked together on a consonant letter, potentially making combined characters much taller than their base forms. Word boundaries are not marked by spacing. Spacing is used instead to indicate phrase breaks, and punctuation marks are used to mark paragraph and text segment breaks. Communities across Thailand used various local variants of the Thai script for centuries, some with their own distinct evolution, before modern Thailand’s linguistic standardisation policies made them obscure.
Script Classification | Abugida |
Letter Case | None |
Commonly Used Quotation Marks | “...”, ‘...’ |
Numerals | 0–9: ๐๑๒๓๔๕๖๗๘๙ [Commonly used] |
Earliest Recorded Usage | c. 1283 CE |
Used to Write | Thai, Pali, Sanskrit |
Added to Unicode | Version 1.0 (1991) |