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Fortunately for localizers, Thai language support has been stabilized by means of standardization achieved in the preceding years. The only limitation is the readiness of the internationalization frameworks within Gnome, KDE, Mozilla and Open Office.

FOSS communities of Thailand contribute a lot to both software development and user support. Governmental organizations also play important roles in FOSS reaching the masses.

Thai Language

The official language of Thailand is Thai. Spoken by almost the entire population, with several dialects in different regions, Thai is a tonal, uninflected and predominantly monosyllabic language. Most polysyllabic words in the vocabulary have been borrowed, mainly from Khmer, Pali and Sanskrit.

Thai belongs to the Tai language family, which includes languages spoken in Assam, northern Myanmar, Thailand, Lao PDR, northern Viet Nam, and the Chinese provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou and Guanxi.⁴

Thai script belongs to the Bhrami family. The oldest evidence of Thai script dates back over 700 years to the Sukhothai Age. Over the years, Thai script has gradually changed. Contemporary Thai script is composed of 44 consonants, 21 vowel symbols (32 sounds when combined), four tone marks, two diacritic marks and 10 decimal digits. Tone marks, diacritic marks and some vowel signs are stacked over or below the base consonants. The stacking is a shared characteristic among many South-East Asian scripts, especially those that are derived from Bhrami like Lao, Khmer and Myanmar languages. However, there are no complex precombined conjuncts in Thai, unlike most Indic scripts (Devanagari, for example). Only stacking is required. Lao is the script closest to Thai.

Standardization

Standardization is the key to the success of Thai language support in computers. It allows interoperability and resolves many localization issues. Important standards include character set, keyboard layout and input/output method specifications.

The standardization of IT in Thailand has been recognized since 1984⁵, when there were many efforts to use the Thai language in computers. More than 26 sets of code pages were defined by different vendors resulting in incompatibility. As a solution they were all unified as TIS 620-2529/1986 as the national standard by the Thai Industrial Standard Institute (TISI). A prominent legacy was the code table defined by Kasetsart University (KU) in a successful R&D effort to enable the Thai system in MS-DOS. It was the most widely adopted standard. Therefore, computer programs were obliged to support both encodings until TIS-620 became more popular and KU became obsolete.

Therefore, when Microsoft released Windows into the Thai market, TIS-620 was the only encoding adopted. The same was true for Macintosh. Thus, the character encoding issue was firmly settled.

In 1990, TIS-620 was amended to conform to ISO standards, but the code table was left completely unchanged. This new version was called TIS 620-2533/1990. The amendment enabled TISI to actively join many international standardization activities. For example, it submitted the character set to the European Computing Manufacturers