Best of Language

There are more than 4.5 billion people speaking nearly 2,300 living languages across Asia. Ride along with our correspondents as they immerse themselves in the language melting pot of Asia

There are more than 4.5 billion people speaking nearly 2,300 living languages across Asia. Ride along with our correspondents as they immerse themselves in the language melting pot of Asia

Feature-Asean.indd 64-65

Revisited

No.120 Issue 5/2016

Title

Melting Pot

The Sounds of Southeast Asia The Thai language is believed to have emerged in the 8th century, when Tai speakers migrated west and southwest to present-day Thailand from the border area between northern Vietnam and China’s Guangxi Province, the speculated birthplace of the Tai language family. Languages in this family are distributed across Southeast and South Asia, from northern Vietnam to northern India. The Thai alphabet is based on the ancient Khmer and Mon scripts, which are in turn derived from southern Indian scripts used throughout Southeast Asia during the first millennium AD. These scripts were originally used to write texts in the ancient Indian languages of Sanskrit and Pali, but were later adapted to represent local languages.