Diaow Ja Jep Dtua Dtai Mai Chai Noi

[Pescator]

"Her" like in �หอะ?

That is mainstream thai

 

 

[Pescator]

[quote=Mentors

 

 

typical Central and Isarn slang style.

 

You should make up your mind, It can only belong to one of these areas at a time, since the dialects in issan differ from the central one as you know.

And by the way there is not an issan word in that expression, so I think it is a safe bet to rule out that area.

 

cheers

hn

 

 

 

 

[luckyfarang]

Could very well be mainstream, but I only heard it from the Isaan girl.

 

She can't say whether it is mainstream or not.

[elef]

I think we must clarify for newbies that Isaan is not a dialect or language and not an area with one one dialect/language - in the biggest part of Isaan the local lingo is "lao" but in areas close to Cambodia they speak "khmer". I use the " " because those dialects are heavily mixed with central thai and not always understood by people from Laos/Cambo.

[samak]

laotians understand quite well the isaan dialect (i had once a maid from laos and she could understand the couple of isaan phrases i know); but the cambodians usually do not understand the khmer/kamen spoken in the thai provinces of Buriram, Surin and Sisaket. some words are similar but majority are not.

[preahko]

native speakers from cambodia can understand about 40% of what a Surin Khmer speaker says IF they know no thai. if the central Khmer speaker knows thai fairly well then that percentage shoots up to something like 80.

 

in my experience Surin speakers have an even harder time understanding Central Khmer (again, unless the Central speaker knows some Thai and can insert it here and there), due to the huge amount of Khmer vocabulary that Surin speakers simply do not have (because they use so much Thai).

 

The various dialects of Lao spoken in Laos, however, are much closer to Isaan Lao than in the Khmer case, especially the southern Lao dialects...

 

The Surin Khmers have been in Isaan much, much longer (and cut off culturally and lingustically from the "center")than most Isaan Lao speakers , who only really started filling up the area in the 19th Century...so in other words, Khmer has had a lot more time to move in different directions in its respective homes.

 

preahko

[Old Hippie]

So mut for Surin. What about Buri Ram and Si Sake** Khmers?

[elef]

Buriram has both lao and khmer areas, one GF was from Buriram but closer to both Khon Kaen and Korat, she didn't understand one word khmer.

[preahko]

yeah, sorry I should have explained, it's kind of a convention to use "Surin Khmer" as an umbrella for all of the dialects spoken up there, but there actually are significant differences between Surin, Sisaket and Buriram dialects. and there are probably a few dialects I don't know about. to my ears, Buriram is the most way-out (farthest from/least intelligible to/with Central Khmer).

 

I think the percentages of ethnic Khmer population are around 60-70% for Surin, 40% for Buriram, and 20% for Sisaket. nobody knows for sure though. and there are clusters of Khmers in Roi Et and Ubon as well.

 

further complicating this whole topic is the fact that the minorities up there (minorities vis-a-vis the Central Thai dominated government, media, culture, etc.) tend to hang together and their solidarity extends to language, so it's very common for Khmer speakers from those areas to also speak Lao and Kuy (Suay to the Thais), another sizeable (Mon-Khmer) ethnic group up there. and while I much less often meet native Lao speakers from Isaan who speak *functional* Khmer or Kuy/Suay, I find plenty who have at least a passable vocabulary.

 

preahko