The language panic

The roots of the language panic

By Chang Noi

17 september 2007

There is a rising panic about the health and well-being of the national language. Ever since the reintroduction of a Ministry of Culture six years ago, the state of Thai has been a matter of concern for the Thai state. As minister, Uraiwan Thienthong floated an idea for Language Clinics as if failure to use the language properly was a disease which could be cured by expert treatment. Recently there has been distress about neologisms (‘ab-baeo’) spreading like viruses, and worry about parents who insist on nicknaming their kids with cute westernisms like Jazz, Golf, Ball, and Byte. A National Language Day has appeared from somewhere. And it was marked recently with a keynote speech delivered not by a linguist, not by an expert in Thai literature, not by a poet, but by General Prem Tinsulanonda, former army chief, head of the Privy Council, and in the eyes of some the key figure behind the current coup-installed regime. This panic is not simply about language.

The Thai language is being tossed around as the society adjusts to globalisation. In their daily lives more people have to deal with computers and with technical subjects which have acquired a global language based mainly on English. With the rapid advance of the consumer society, everybody is assaulted by the language of modern commerce which is English or based on English. Politics also plays a part. The ex prime minister loved littering his speeches with English for effect.

In this context, mis-speaking Thai has even become fashionable. Music radio stations like to use DJs who seem to speak Thai out of the wrong part of the mouth – perhaps a signal that they have spent a lot of their youth outside the country and thus qualify to have some expertise in the western-centred world of music. In their desperate search for novelty, advertisers adopted these same voices and gave them even wider soundplay.

Meanwhile, some intellectuals actively campaigned to have written Thai constructed more like written English. A few even began to write in sentences punctuated with commas and full-stops. This fashion never quite caught on, but several journalists and authors write in a style so English in feel that the punctuation can be imagined.

In vocabulary, in sentence construction, and in pronunciation, the language is being profoundly affected by English. But that is not the only source of changes. Chinese also has a subtle role.

Since Thailand’s big population of Chinese origin has become enthusiastic about reclaiming their heritage, language has been affected. Terms of endearment, casual forms of address, curses and slang based on Chinese have come into much wider use. Pronunciation has been affected too. A way of speaking Thai by barely moving the mouth, squeezing the sound through the nose to acquire a strong nasal twang, softening all the hard consonants or even dropping them altogether to achieve a slurring affect, becae fashionable first in upmarket girls’ schools and then spread much more widely through the media and through emulation.

Finally, there are also some effects from regional dialects. The popularity of comedians and fame of sports stars has given much greater play on the media to a way of speaking Thai strongly influenced by the flatter tonality of the northeast.

All of these influences create many big questions for those who take on themselves a responsibility for determining how the language should be constructed and pronounced. What exactly is “correct Thai”? Who decides?

It would be comforting to feel that you could simply reverse back to some point in time when the language was in the “right form.” But things are not so easy. If we peer back before this era of westernisation, Chinese pride, and regional integration, looking for a time when the language was more stable, we are probably going to be disappointed.

In the century that preceded the age of globalisation, the Thai language underwent a massive upheaval. With the coming of the nation state, bureaucracy, and modern business, the language had to be adapted for expressing many new ideas and composing many new sorts of documents. New words had to be invented for new concepts like state, democracy, document, rights, and so on. The linguists and intellectuals who undertook this task generally turned to Pali/Sanskrit for help. This resulted in a range of words which use Pali/Sanskrit roots but are totally novel.

The enthusiasm for Pali/Sanskrit was not limited to this technical demand for new words. During his travels around the provinces, King Rama V enjoyed renaming places with fancier versions based on Pali/Sanskrit. It became fashionable to adopt personal names which had a Pali/Sanskrit origin. The fashion began among the noble elite, but eventually became conventional for much of the urban population. Indeed, today most of the urban middle class would find it very déclassé to give their children names based on Thai rather than Pali-Sanskrit.

This adoption of Pali/Sanskrit was only one part of a much broader change in Thai over the pre-globalisation century. Grammar, construction, and pronunciation all changed too. These changes were demanded because the language had to be put to new uses. They were shaped by the political and social conditions of the day. The enthusiasm for Pali/Sanskrit was rooted in the royalist nationalism of the era. In the face of western colonialism, the Thai elite turned to an Asian source of “high culture.”

Languages are very sensitive to the world around them. They change because they are constantly being put to new uses. If the Thai language is currently changing very rapidly, it is because the society and its relationship to the outside world are changing very rapidly. The current panic over the language seems to be part of a more general panic over the reduced ability of “the authorities” to impose their will. Should the state interfere in what nicknames parents want to give to their kids?

Source : The Nation on September 17, 2007