Vietnamese and Thai: Two Closely-Related Languages

A Vietnamese professor of education was a bit surprised when I told her that Thai and Vietnamese have a lot of cognates, or words sharing the same origins.

Not only that, upon close look both share almost identical syntactic structure. 

As a former head of the Asean language unit of DPu and someone who is still in charge of Asean language courses offering at Dhurakij Pundit University (DpU) in Bangkok,  I happen to know some Vietnamese as I have been helping a Vietnamese teacher to prepare her lessons and exams. What I have found to be the case is the sentence structure: both Thai and Vietnamese follows the same structure. Moreover, many words are one syllable words. And there are many cognates or words having the same linguistic derivation as another; many words are indeed from the same original word or root.

My conviction is not lonely. Ajarn Wilaiwan Khanittanan from Thammasat University, Bangkok, Thailand has provided evidence to support my claim. In her paper, "Ancient links between Thai and Vietnam: Evidence from cognates, Sukhothai inscriptions, and traditional calendrical terms for nnimals", she demonstrates 5 points of language evidence which indicate that there is a strong link between ancient Sukhothat and ancient Vietnam.

Ajarn Wilaiwan, notes that the strongest evidence (proving that there is a strong link) between Thai and Vietnamese lies in the words that share the same origin. However, it is not easy to tell whether many words are from Chinese or the Red River basin.

Examples

• shop (Thai: ห้าง) (Vietnamese: hàng )
• waist (Thai: เอว (Vietnamese : eo )

Structure: Subject + Verb + Object

Anh yêu em.
พี่ รัก น้อง
Em yêu anh khong? น้องรักพี่ไหม