Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
nels between the royal courts. This shared vocabulary was, for the most part, taken from
Pali
,
in which the scriptures of Theravada Buddhism were written. During the Lao civil war, Thai-
land sided with the Lao royalists. The communist victory and death of the Lao monarchy saw
the end of flowery court language, but although the communist government temporarily sup-
pressed Lao Buddhism, no direct attacks on Pali-derived vocabulary were mounted. Some as-
pects of everyday spoken and written Lao were targeted, however. In an effort to erase class
divisions, the communist government discouraged the use of personal pronouns that flaunted
status or begged servitude. A typical banned pronoun was “
doi kha noi
”, which translates into
English as “I” but which literally means “I, small slave”.
After the revolution the Lao government also made official changes to the
Laoalphabet
in
order to simplify it, as well as purge it of aspects that the communists felt were too similar to
Thai. The Lao government's policies had, for a time anyway, the desired effect of levelling
class divisions, and the simplified alphabet has no doubt made teaching the illiterate to read
an easier task. However, the changes and simplifications have had an unforeseen effect on the
Lao language. What the government didn't anticipate was the growing sophistication of the
Thai media
and subsequent boom in popularity of Thai films, television and popular music
in Laos. Every day, tens of thousands of Lao tune in to receive a dose of Thai, with its strat-
ified personal pronouns and honorifics. Even broadcasts of the Thai royal language, almost
identical to the extinct Lao royal language, can be heard daily on the Thai television news.
These factors have conspired to give the Lao something of an inferiority complex about their
own language, and they often compare it unfavourably to Thai by saying that Thai sounds
more “beautiful” and “polite” than Lao.
Transliteration
Visitors who travel between Laos and Thailand may notice the similarity in the scripts of the
two countries. This is because the Lao script was actually based on an early version of writ-
ten Thai. During colonial times, the French considered replacing the
Lao script
with an al-
phabet similar to
quoc ngu
, the Romanized script now used to write Vietnamese. The project
was never implemented, as French influence was waning at the time, but devising the system
presented quite a challenge. The Lao language contains sounds that don't exist in French, or
any other Western European language for that matter, making transliteration an inexact exer-
cise at best.
Imperfect as it was, the fledgling
French transliteration system
has had some staying
power. The Lao seem comfortable with the French system, and many educated Lao prefer to
have their names transliterated in the French manner, which serves to differentiate them from
the Thai, who use a different system. Official maps of Laos produced by the Lao government
use a modified form of the old French system. This can create problems for English speak-
ers who assume that the system was created for them. But if you keep in mind, for example,
