Consonants

Thai distinguishes among three voice/aspiration patterns for plosive consonants:

• unvoiced, unaspirated
• unvoiced, aspirated
• voiced, unaspirated

Where English has only a distinction between the voiced, unaspirated /b/ and the unvoiced, aspirated /p/, Thai distinguishes a third sound which is neither voiced nor aspirated, which occurs in English only as an allophone of /p/, approximately the sound of the p in "spin." There is similarly an alveolar /t/, /tʰ/, /d/ triplet. In the velar series there is a /k/, /kʰ/ pair and in the postalveolar series the /tɕ/, /tɕʰ/ pair.

In each cell below, the first line indicates International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the second indicates the Thai characters in initial position (more letters appearing in the same box have identical pronunciation).

	Bilabial			Labio- dental	Alveolar			Post- alveolar		Palatal	Velar			Glottal
Plosive	[ p ] ป	[ pʰ ] ผ,พ,ภ	[ b ] บ		[ t ] ฏ,ต	[ tʰ ] ฐ,ฑ*,ฒ,ถ,ท,ธ	[ d ] ฎ,ฑ*,ด				[ k ] ก	[ kʰ ] ข,ฃ,ค,ฅ,ฆ		[ ʔ ] อ**
Nasal			[ m ] ม				[ n ] ณ,น						[ ŋ ] ง
Fricative				[ f ] ฝ,ฟ	[ s ] ซ,ศ,ษ,ส									[ h ] ห,ฮ
Affricate								[ tɕ ] จ	[ tɕʰ ] ฉ, ช, ฌ
Trill							[ r ] ร
Approximant										[ j ] ญ,ย			[ w ] ว
Lateral approximant							[ l ] ล,ฬ

^* ฑ can be pronounced as [tʰ] or [d] depended on Thai words.

^** The glottal plosive is implied after a short vowel without final, or the silent อ before a vowel.