What do you call a Thai person? Thai, not Thailander

It sounds like a quiz question, and somehow it keeps coming up: at school, in a work meeting, in a comment under a photo of your Yai’s cooking. Is it Thai? Thailander? Thailandese? Here is the short answer, plus the bits of history behind it.

What do you call people from Thailand?

Thai. It does every job:

• One person: a Thai, or a Thai person. “My mum is Thai.”
• More than one: Thais, or Thai people.
• The adjective: Thai food, Thai culture, a Thai passport.
• The language: Thai.

Dictionary.com defines the noun Thai as “a native or inhabitant of Thailand, or a person of Thai descent”. That last part matters on a site like this one: the dictionary already counts you.

Is it Thai or Thailander?

Thai. To be fair to anyone who has said Thailander: it is a real word. Dictionary.com gives it as another name for a Thai person, and Wiktionary lists it as “someone from Thailand”, with Thai as the synonym. It just isn’t what people say. In English books published from 2000 to 2022, Google’s Ngram Viewer shows “Thais” appearing hundreds of times more often than “Thailanders”.

“Thailandese” isn’t in either dictionary we checked. If someone uses it, they mean well; a gentle “we just say Thai” is plenty.

The confusion is understandable. English often builds the people’s name from the country, like Icelanders or New Zealanders. Thailand works the other way round: Thai is the name of the people, and the country’s English name was built from it.

How do you say “Thai person” in Thai?

In Thai, a Thai person is khon thai: khon means person, thai means Thai. You’ll hear it most in the phrase every heritage kid gets asked to say sooner or later:

เป็นคนไทย

pen khon thai

เป็นคนไทยครับ

pen khon thai khrap

เป็นคนไทยค่ะ

pen khon thai kha

Who is speaking?

ครับ said by a manค่ะ said by a woman

Draft: waiting for a native speaker’s review.

Thai says yes by echoing the verb, so when someone asks if you’re Thai, the shortest answer is just เป็น (pen).

Is Thailand the same as Siam? What about “Siamese”?

Yes, Siam is the country’s older name. The changes went back and forth a little:

Sources give different days for the 1939 change (the Bangkok Post says 24 June, EBSCO says 5 June), so we’ve kept to the month for 1939 and 1945. Both agree on 11 May 1949.

The Bangkok Post’s history timeline notes something worth knowing about that 1949 debate: supporters of “Thailand” said it would encourage patriotism, while opponents argued that Siam, the traditional name, was more ethnically inclusive. People were already asking who the name was for.

So should you call Thai people Siamese? No. Today the word mostly lives on in two places. The Siamese cat comes from a cat native to Thailand. And Siamese twins comes from Chang and Eng Bunker, conjoined brothers born in Siam in 1811 who became famous in the US; the modern term is conjoined twins. Dictionary.com also notes that “Siamese” is the former adjective for Thai, so you’ll still meet it in older books.

Is “Thai” a nationality or an ethnicity?

Both, and that’s the honest, slightly messy answer. In English, Thai can mean a citizen of Thailand, and it can also mean the Thai language and culture.

Thailand is a multi-ethnic country. At a UN committee review in 2021, Thailand’s delegation said the country gives legal recognition to 62 ethnic groups. Among the biggest communities are Central Thai; the people of Isan in the Northeast, where many families speak a language very close to Lao; Northern Thai; Southern Thai; Malay Muslims in the far south; a large Thai-Chinese community; and hill peoples in the north and west, such as the Karen and Hmong.

A Karen grandmother in Chiang Mai, a Malay-speaking family in Pattani and a Thai-Chinese uncle who closes the shop for Chinese New Year can all call themselves Thai. If your family is from the Northeast, our Isan family words will help on the next trip home.

What about people who are Thai by family abroad?

They’re Thai too. Many people put both halves into one word: Thai-American, Thai-British, Thai-Swedish, Thai-Australian. Some say Thai first, some say it second, some change depending on who’s asking. All of these are fine.

If one of your parents is Thai and the other isn’t, the Thai word you’ll hear is luk khrueng; our page on what luk khrueng means covers it properly.

We won’t rank anyone here. Being Thai by family counts, whether you grew up in Bangkok or Gothenburg, whether your Thai is fluent or mostly listening, whether you have a Thai passport yet or not. (On the paperwork side, see Thai dual citizenship; your embassy has the final word on your case.)

The phrase a lot of our readers end up using is this one:

โตเมืองนอก

toh mueang nork

โตเมืองนอกครับ

toh mueang nork khrap

โตเมืองนอกค่ะ

toh mueang nork kha

Who is speaking?

ครับ said by a manค่ะ said by a woman

Draft: waiting for a native speaker’s review.

It explains the accent without apologising for it. If that in-between feeling is familiar, you might like life between two homes.

Say it like you mean it

The Thai and proud moment in Reply Thai is where you practise saying “I’m Thai”, “I grew up abroad” and “I’m Thai at heart” out loud, so the answer is ready the next time someone asks where you’re really from.

Reply Thai for iPhoneComing soon

Thai words on this page are a draft until a native speaker has reviewed them.