Thailand, Thai and Tai

Thailand Thai and Tai

Siam, Thailand, Thai or Tai; what do they all mean and which terms are correct?

The official name of this medium-sized, Southeast Asian country, (roughly similar in area to France or Spain), is the Kingdom of Thailand, and has been since 1939 when the prime minister at the time suggested changing the name from Siam in order to better describe the kingdom’s residents. Its inhabitants could be referred to as Thais, Thai or Tai, with Thai also serving as a plural and Tai describing the country’s predominant ethnic and linguistic family,  Tai-Kadai. (1) (We did once overhear a foreign visitor stating that the Thailandese were very friendly people.) The term Tai however, also includes Shan, Lao and numerous subgroups (but more on this later.)

The Thai name for Thailand is Prathet Thai or the more colloquial Muong Thai, although the origins of the terms Thai and Siam are still debated by etymologists. European visitors to the early kingdom of Ayutthaya, beginning with the Portuguese in the 16th century, followed by the Dutch, French and British, appear to have adopted the term Siam, although quite where they adopted it from is unclear.

Siam is not a Thai word and while the Sanskrit term syama, meaning dark, is often proposed as a root, in so far as the two principal, neighbouring ethnic groups in the early Ayutthaya period were Khmers to the east and Mon to the west – both of whom are typically darker-skinned than the Thais – this has never made much sense to us. There is some evidence the ancient Khmers referred to the inhabitants of the Chao Phraya Valley – and what are today Thailand’s Central Plains – as Siam (or Syam) people although during the Angkorian administration of the region in the 11th and 12th centuries the vast majority of the local population would have been Mon, who are as we said, typically, relatively dark-skinned. It seems improbable that the Khmer term Siam was intended to describe a minority of Tai settlers alone while they were also unlikely to have been grouped together as the Mons are related to the Khmers, while Tai languages are from a different linguistic family and would have been largely unintelligible to both Mons and Khmers.

Another suggestion points to the Mon word rhmañña, meaning stranger, which is also considered to be a root word for both Shan and Assam. (Two regions which were also settled by Tai migrants.) To the Indigenous Austro-Asiatic Mon population, who’d inhabited much of what is today Thailand for millennia, these 12th to 13th-century Tai migrants from the north would have been indeed, strangers. (Relic minorities speaking Mon-Khmer languages remain today as far north as eastern Burma – Wa and Palaung – and northern Vietnam while modern Vietnamese also falls into the same broad linguistic family.)

The words Thai (ไทย) and Tai (ไท) are both part of the Thai lexicon and actually have very similar meanings, being generally translated as free or independent. Even Thais themselves were unsure and apparently, a vote in parliament had to be held in order to decide between the two spellings. (They are different words with different tones, although few non-Thai speakers would be able to differentiate.) Prathet means nation or country, while Muong, (also written Mueang) is a more archaic term and describes a city-state or chiefdom. The earliest Tai migrants into what is modern-day Thailand arrived in the 12th and 13th centuries and founded settlements in northern valleys such as Chiang Saen, Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai. (Chiang is a Sino-Tai word with a similar definition to Muang and also means city or fortified place.) Many towns and cities across Laos and Thailand as well as Burma’s Shan State and China’s Yunnan (both regions with large ethnic Tai populations) feature the word Chiang, Chieng or Xieng today while Chiang Mai City, (as with any other provincial capital), is still officially referred to as Muang Chiang Mai.

As we mentioned, Thai refers specifically to citizens of the Kingdom of Thailand, while Tai is a wide ethnic and linguistic family originating in southern China and encompassing myriad subgroups. Shan, (also known as Tai Yai), Lao, the White, Red and Black Tai who presently inhabit northern Vietnam and the Tai Lu and Dai of Yunnan are just a few of the better-known subgroups. (2) The languages are generally mutually intelligible – at least to some extent – although quite when a regional dialect becomes a separate language is best left for linguists to debate.

In our opinion, when considering Thailand, Thai or Tai; Muang Tai would be the most accurate term for the early city-states and valley settlements they established, while prathet and Thai are accurate today but must be considered terms of recent origin. The anomalous Siam remains something of a mystery and perhaps simply evolved from being lost in translation somewhere between Sanskrit, Mon, Chinese and Portuguese. Theories abound but, to our knowledge, none have been conclusively confirmed.

(1) We say predominant, as modern Thailand also includes large minorities of Khmer in Lower Isan, Malays in the far south, Chinese in many urban areas and various Sino-Tibetan hill tribe groups in the far north.

(2) Vietnamese do erroneously refer to the various ethnic Tai groups of the far north as Thai.