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The Lao language (orange) and the Isan language (yellow).The Mekong river forms the border between the countries of Laos and Thailand, and the Lao and Isan languages.
Lao is a Tai language spoken by 7 million people in Laos and 23 million people in northeast Thailand.[1] After the conclusion of the Franco-Siamese conflict of 1893, the Lao-speaking world was politically split at the Mekong River, with the left bank eventually becoming modern Laos and the right bank the Isan region of Thailand (formerly known as Siam prior to 1932). Isan refers to the local development of the Lao language in Thailand, as it diverged in isolation from Laos. The Isan language is still referred to as Lao by native speakers.[2]
Isan houses the majority of Lao speakers and the affinity of shared culture with Laos is palpable in the food, architecture, music and language of the region. In its purest spoken form, the Isan language is basically the same as Lao spoken in Laos.[3] Using just tone and some lexical items, there are at least twelve distinct speech varieties of Isan, most of which also continue across the Mekong River into Laos. In fact, the different speech varieties on roughly the same latitude tend to have more affinity with each other, despite the international border, than to speech varieties to the north and south. Only a handful of lexical items and grammatical differences exist that differentiate Isan as a whole, mainly as a result of more than a century of political separation between Isan and Laos, but most of these terms were introduced in the 1980s when Isan was better integrated into Thailand's transportation and communication infrastructure.[3]
^"Lao". About World Languages. Retrieved 2016-05-25.
^Keyes, Charles F. (1966). "Ethnic Identity and Loyalty of Villagers in Northeastern Thailand". Asian Survey.
^ abEnfield, N. J. (2002). "How to Define 'Lao', 'Thai', and 'Isan' Language? A View from Linguistic Science" (PDF). Tai Culture. 8 (1): 62–67.
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