Speech impediment in Thailand?

When I left home as a young man and joined the Navy, I met boys from all corners of the Netherlands. Of course the Amsterdammertjes had the biggest mouth and they blamed the Limburgers and the Groningers for not being able to understand them due to their speech impediment.

I, born in Twente, also spoke a dialect and although you tried to speak “properly”, it was always clear that I had a special accent. That has actually always remained the case, because much later and sometimes still today, people can hear my Twente origin, although I have not lived in Tukkerland for decades.

The difference between two dialects or two languages ​​mainly lies in the sounds used to say something. A Tukker uses different sounds than, for example, a Thai, regional or national, we say, but that is not entirely true. I'll get back to that.

Talking comes easily to most people, but it should be remembered that no human muscle movement is as complicated and as subtle as the tongue movements required to form language sounds. The coordination of muscles in the tongue, oral cavity, lungs and lips required for speech is a complicated process.

Also the reverse — understanding what someone else is saying to you — is almost too complicated for words. It is a miracle that you are able to understand without conscious effort what someone else is saying to you. He moves his mouth and a stream of distortions comes into the air and you understand what he means to say.

How difficult that actually is to understand becomes clear when you learn a foreign language. There inevitably comes a stage where you know quite a few words and can follow a written or a slowly recited text without major problems. But as soon as experienced speakers of that language start speaking to you, you're in trouble. They may only say words you know, but their talk sounds like a long inextricable stream of sounds. You can't even hear where one word begins and another ends. It seems as if those foreigners are sticking all the words and sentences together.

Making and understanding speech sounds is an almost inhuman task. A sensible person would think that no one could put their children through such a job. And yet it happens every day. All peoples, all cultures in the world have always used a language and expect their children to learn to understand and speak that language at a young age.

Very young children can recognize and reproduce the sounds of their mother tongue. Even newborn babies seem to hear the difference between their mother tongue and the sounds of a foreign language. They learned this in a playful way, without any explicit education, without exams and without training sessions under professional supervision. No matter how many people have traumas from their childhood, no one ever complains about the terrible time they had to go through because they had to learn their native language from their parents.

Because language, any language, is indescribably complicated, not so much in terms of writing and grammar, but especially in terms of sounds. Any dialect or language is often incredibly difficult for adult outsiders to learn: a native will always hear that you are not a true born and raised resident by the pronunciation. But, I'll say it again, a child learns the system extremely easily, no matter how hard school and parents act against it.

The explanation for this, given by phonological science, is that a baby is born with a lot of ideas in his head about what his native language could possibly look like. The most important part of the mechanism is actually already in the young brain. Only a few buttons need to be put in the right position. That switching of those buttons can only easily happen until puberty, after that it is forever too late. That baby starts to set the buttons at a young age. There are even indications that language learning actually begins in the womb. In any case, newborn babies appear to be able to distinguish between the sounds of their own and foreign languages ​​with reasonable success. So long before they start talking, they have already learned something about their mother tongue.

I said earlier that a language or dialect often has specific sounds that you have learned from an early age. Specific does not mean unique, because it is quite possible that sounds from one language also occur in another language. After all, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of languages ​​and dialects in this world. A nice example of this is my family name Gringhuis. A gutted “gr” at the beginning and the letter combination “ui”. Let a foreigner pronounce that and you will hear the craziest variants. Yet it is a language that masters those sounds, because in Saudi Arabia, among others, my name was pronounced flawlessly. Also think of the word Scheveningen, also unpronounceable for many foreigners.

We, Dutch speakers, also have difficulty with certain sounds in foreign languages. Just notice the simple pronunciation of the “th” in the English language. Pronounce with the tongue against the teeth, but usually a "d" or "s" is used instead. “That” then becomes “that” or “sat”. There are many more examples to give, but I want to talk about the “speech impediment” of Thailand have.

It is of course not a speech impediment, but Thais cannot or hardly pronounce certain sounds of letter combinations for the reasons mentioned above. The “th” and “sh” are impossible for him, so a shop “Theo's Shoes” becomes “TO-Choo” at best. Any idea what a Thai means by "wonn-wor"? He doesn't know the V, so that becomes a W, he also doesn't know an "l" as the last letter of a syllable and then becomes an "n". Right, he does indeed mean a Volvo. Take “Au bon pain” the American sandwich shop, which you also find in Thailand. Now the American himself already has trouble with this French name, but the Thai pronunciation does not get any further than "Oh-Pong-Beng".

Anyone who interacts with Thai people knows the small examples of impossible to pronounce words. House becomes hou, wife becomes wai, five becomes fai, if you want to drink white wine, a Thai asks for a wai wai, etc. Let a Thai say desks or even better vegatables, impossible!

Andrew Biggs wrote a nice article in the Bangkok Post about that Thai speech impediment, where he mainly talks about a visit to IKEA. In the Netherlands we say “iekeeja”, an Englishman says “aikieja” and a Swede – the country of origin of IKEA – calls it “iekee-a”, hardly mentioning the last a. On a car Andrew saw the name in the Thai language and that phonetically translated back into English became “Ickier”. The joke is that this word means "unpleasant" or "old-fashioned" in English. “I” before a name also doesn't mean much good in the Thai language, so IKEA could be someone called KEA, but a less pleasant person.

It has become a long story to explain why a Thai so often makes "comic" statements of the English language in our ears. Conversely, even a Thai can sometimes laugh when someone tries to pronounce a Thai word correctly. Laughing is allowed, as long as it is done with respect for everyone's accent and is not labeled as a speech impediment.

Language? It is always fascinating! I am still amazed when I see two strange people together, who shout all kinds of noises at each other. One talks and the other listens and oh wonder, he also understands! A real miracle!

NB For this article I have used text parts from the book “Tongval” by Marc van Oostendorp, which can be found on the Internet and the article by Andrew Biggs in the Bangkok Post of December 4, 2011