Thai Studies
Please note: All information given on these pages is for general informational purposes only and is not legally binding. In case of any discrepancies, the information provided by the Studienbüro (Student Services Office) always takes precedence!
Thai belongs to the Tai-Kadai family of languages. This family, comprising approximately 70 languages and spoken by more than 100 million people, extends from southern China to the Malay Peninsula and from northern Vietnam to northeastern India. Thai belongs to the southwestern subgroup of the Tai-Kadai languages and serves as an important lingua franca in mainland Southeast Asian.
Thai Studies is the scholarly engagement with the language, culture, literature, history, and society of Thailand and some neighboring regions, based on native written (and to a lesser extent, oral) traditions. We study these traditions using the philological-historical method. Although it forms the indispensable foundation of Thai Studies, the field is by no means limited to Thai philology.
While Thai is the first language to be learned in Thai Studies, Indonesian-Malay, Vietnamese, or Sanskrit has to be chosen as the second language. (Please ask the student advisor about this in advance!) In specific cases, other secondary languages – like Lao, Khmer, or languages from one of the other specialization branches (Austronesian Studies and Vietnamese Studies) – might be approved upon request.
