The Man With One Watch Knows What Time It Is

Learning Lao is a lot tougher than learning Thai. It’s not that the language is any more difficult, it has to do with the absence of standardization and lack of decent educational materials.

Thailand has several dialects, but the central Thai dialect has become the standard for the entire country. Anything written in Thai will be in this standardized dialect. Any books, recordings, or other educational materials will teach you this form of Thai. The language obeys grammatical and stylistic rules that are probably written down somewhere. I don’t really care.

As an aside, I want to talk about linguists for a moment. These people are stupid. They can’t figure out a damn thing about the Lao language. All they can agree on is that there is a language called “Lao” spoken in and around Laos and that it is in the same family as several other languages, most notably Thai. They can’t even agree on what this family of languages should be called.

Lao has several dialects, none of which is the official one. I say “several” when referring to the number because I have no fucking clue how many there are and neither does anyone else. Figure range from three (north, central, and south) to a whole shitload. Various books have helpfully published dialog maps, all of which contradict each other. The major feature that distinguishes dialects from each other is differences in tone. It shouldn’t be surprising that published accounts of tones in various dialects are totally contradictory.

There are only a few books and other sources for learning Lao. All them agree you should learn the Vientiane dialect because this is more likely to be understood in the rest of Laos. Unfortunately every source, literally every source, disagrees on what the Vientiane dialect is. Some say it has 5 tones, others 6, but none of them even agree on the tones themselves.

If you want to learn Lao, pick one source and stick with it. If you buy another book you’ll just end up confusing the hell out of yourself because certain parts will be contradictory. I’m not even that great of a Lao speaker, but everything I’ve looked at has had plenty of typos and other errors. Currently I’m using this website because it’s comprehensive and free. The best book I’ve found is called “Lao for Everybody” by Klaus Werner. It’s terrible for learning conversational Lao but is an excellent reference book for grammar. Unfortunately, it seems to be out of print. I’ll be writing more about learning the Lao language in the future.