Thai, formerly called Siamese, is the official language of Thailand. It is currently used by about 50 million people.
Thai script, used in Thailand, is the writing system used to label Thai. It was first invented in 1283 by King Ramkhamhaeng, the third king of the famous Kingdom of Sukhothai, and is also the second son of the establisher of the Kingdom, King Intharathit. The alphabet system of Thai script inherited ancient Indian Sanskrit. Being an analytic language, different tones of Thai have the function of classifying vocabularies and grammar.
Thai has a massive amount of vocabularies coming from ancient Indian – Sanskrit and Pali, with most of them being political, philosophic, religious, art, psychological and abstract terms, which were spread through Brahmanism and Buddhism. Due to wars and natural hazards in recent centuries, dialects from Southern China accompanied with flows of immigration streamed into Thailand. In modern Thai, it is conservatively estimated that more that 10-15% of vocabularies come from Chinese languages.
Early Thai literature, mostly related to religions, royal family, and nobles, was expressed in the format of poems. Under the influence of Western culture, loanwords from English become common; for instance, names of electrical appliances and technological terminology are mainly transcribed directly and the number of these rise gradually.
