THE NEW THAILAND
A walk around any Thai supermarket or shopping mall, where an unbelievable number of smartphone-using staff are sitting down and chatting, is testimony to the unnecessarily high level of employment in Thailand. From the spare tire store worker whose only duty appears to be glancing slightly over the shoulder of an unattended customer to the staff who monitor and wield flashlights while commuters walk through metal detectors at train stations, many of Thailand’s shops, stores and industries seem to employ around a third more workers than a foreigner is normally used to. Indeed, it often appears that Thailand creates a job and employs somebody to complete a task that only needs doing because it wasn’t done by the relevant person in the first place.
Do not make the misguided assumption, however, that this increase in numbers of staff correlates with an increase in productivity or efficiency. Asking the whereabouts of an item in a Thai store merely results in an extended game of Chinese whispers. Salaries being so low, combined with staff numbers being so high, often results in either an unwillingness or an unrequited ability to think or perform a duty outside the very narrow remit of a job.
The flip side of the 100 baht note depicts King Rama V freeing slaves.
CAN I HELP YOU?
Appearances are doubly deceptive, with many economists suggesting that Thai employment figures probably aren’t as rosy as they first appear. A significant percentage, they suggest, are merely not officially unemployed or are working fewer than 20 hours per week. There are also many Thai workers, especially in the tourist industry, who suffer from off-season unemployment.
As millions of Thais are not required to pay tax, the knock-on effect contributes to the woefully inadequate welfare system, which often means little or no help when Thais get down on their luck and really need it.
Like many welfare programs in Thailand, child care, and even a knowledge of it, is mainly only available to those within the system and those who have made social security contributions. For those who have, a pilot child welfare program was launched in 2015 that equates to, on average, around 400 baht (US$12) a month for children up to one year old. After that, parents are on their own. In contrast, the Thai government is more accommodating towards senior citizens, regardless of whether they have paid social security during their lifetime. They qualify for a state pension of 600 baht per month in their sixties, 700 baht in their seventies and so on.
Some 40 percent of Thailand’s work-force is engaged in the agricultural sector, 40 percent in service industries and 20 percent in manufacturing. The combined success of the manufacturing and service industries, alongside Thailand’s strong, steady industry of agricultural exports, has resulted in a reduction in the number of people living below the poverty line from 65 percent in 1988 to 13 percent in 2011. According to the World Bank, Thailand is one of the great development success stories of the 20th century.
Long commutes to work are often part of the daily slog.
Four hands are not necessarily better than two.
THE THAI LANGUAGE
With seemingly lax one-size-fits-all rules regarding tenses, relatively simple sentence structures and mainly monosyllabic words, the Thai language appears to be one of the easier constructed languages.
Once you dig deeper, however, you will learn that the tonal language of Thai, with its subtle nuances, is incredibly difficult to master. There are also different dialects depending on region, and particular words, sentence structures and phrases that are only used in certain circumstances. There are even different registers, including Religious Thai and Royal Thai. There are also masculine and feminine versions of some Thai words. Krab for men and ka for women, as polite particles to end sentences, are the most commonly used.
The spoken language of Thai is purported to have originated from the border of Vietnam and China and has similarities with the languages of Laos, Myanmar and northern Vietnam. In fact, around 70 percent of the words from the Thai dialect of Isan (bordering Laos) and the Lao language are the same, as is the sentence structure. Despite these similarities, however, there are still enough differences to mean that someone who speaks only Thai, Thai Isan or Lao will not necessarily be able to understand other languages.
‘THAI ONLY’
The majority of residents of the rural Thai area of Isan are ethnic Lao and as such are bilingual. Although Thai is now taught and used in schools, as decreed by Field Marshal Plaek through his process of ‘Thaification’, a mixture of Thai and Lao is used in the social environment. ‘Thaification’ was also imposed on the Chinese community in Thailand, resulting in the teaching of Chinese being banned in favor of the Thai language.
HARDER THAN IT LOOKS
On paper, it gets harder, with written Thai at first, second and third glance resembling little more than a series of squiggles. It is believed to have been introduced during the reign of the third Sukhothai sovereign, King Ramkhamhaeng, in 1283. Written Thai was based on the pre-existing Pali, Sanskrit and Indian writing systems and has remained largely unchanged since its inception.
One of the most difficult aspects of the language is that unlike English and other European ‘alphabet languages’, Thai is a tonal (phonemic) language. This means it contains a much greater degree of variation in the pronunciation of its syllables. There are five lexical tones in Thai (low, mid, high, falling, rising), which makes for a very melodic but consequently hard to decipher language. For example, the word mai means ‘new’ if said with a low tone, ‘no’ if said with a falling tone, ‘silk’ if said with a rising tone but creates a question if used at the end of a sentence.
Thai people have a great love of puns and double entendres as heard in the sometimes risqué molam (country music) lyrics, which adds to the complexity.
HEARING THE DIFFERENCE
The Thai written language uses a phonemic alphabet of 44 consonants and 32 vowels. Perhaps because of the diversity and range of sounds, most Thais carry all their lives a school-learned mnemonic picture association with every consonant, for example, gaw gai (chicken), taw tao (turtle), law ling (monkey). In fact, tones are so important that quite often a Thai speaker will add extra sounds when speaking a foreign language. This is most noticeably done when an extra vowel is added between two consecutive consonants. ‘Steak’ becomes ‘st-ay-ke’ and ‘stamp’ becomes ‘sa-ta-m’. Sometimes the Thai speaker may just decide to omit sounding one of the consonants altogether.
Believed by some, but not all, to be the first example of Thai writing.
Easy as A, B, C. Most start off by learning the Thai alphabet.
Although many signs are also in English, there is no guarantee you won’t get lost.
GRUNT LIKE A LOCAL
All manner of grunts, exclamations and interjections pepper Thai conversation. Here are some of the most common you’re likely to hear:
Aow! Used to show either surprise or disappointment.
Hoh!