Thailand's official language is THAI (also known as Siamese). The Thai language Is not as difficult as you may think. Learning a few basic words will make your stay in Thailand more rewarding. Thai has 44 consonants and 32 vowels and diphthongs. Thai has five tones: mid, low, falling, rising and high, which with practice basic words and phrases are relatively easy to master. Most of the difficulty in mastering basic Thai comes from getting used to the new and diffrent sounds. Once your ears become accustomed to the overall phonetic system, the rest is fairly easy. The grammar is very straightforward; words do not change to signify tense, gender or plurarity, and there are no articles. Translations from Thai script to roman are sometimes confusing. With no clear rules, one Thai word may have several roman spellings. For this reason, many Thai language guides give different spelling of words.