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The Tones

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Consonant/Tonal Groupings

This chapter gives a brief overview of the Lao tones, and we recommend that you work with both the accompanying audio CD and a Lao language teacher to master them.

Lao Basics divides each consonant into one of the three traditional groupings (or classes): Mid, Low, or High. The consonants in each particular grouping follow the same rules when accompanied by various combinations of ending consonants, vowels (short, long or nasal), and tonal marks. For example, all eight Mid consonants follow the same rules, whereas Low consonants have their own rules. And High consonants have their own rules. Sometimes, rules do overlap groups, but rules rarely cover all groups.

It can be very difficult to memorize a chart with all of these peculiarities, and for that reason Lao Basics takes a different path. Instead of memorizing a chart, you will learn to read, write, comprehend and say each consonant, each vowel, each word and each sentence in this book; in short you will learn by doing.

Listen closely to the pronunciation on the CD, and if possible, work with a native Lao speaker to master these sounds.

Tone Marks

There are four tonal marks that are placed over some Lao vowels from time to time, but only two are regularly used, and we have attempted to teach you mostly words without tone marks for the first part of the vowel section.

The first tonal symbol is called mai eik (pronounced "my ehk"). It looks like a short number "1" placed over a letter [' ] and causes the sound of all words that contain this tone mark to take on a middle (slightly high) pitch. Here are some examples:

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The second tonal symbol is called mai too. You will learn later in the vowel section that mai is a short sound and too is a long sound, pronounced "my toe." Since English is rarely consistent in pronunciation, however, we use a different transliteration system, which you will learn as you progress through the book. Mai too looks like a tiny, squiggly number "2" with a long tail []. When this is placed over a vowel, it causes the sound of Mid and Low Consonant words to drop from a high tone to a low one, while it causes words starting with a High consonant to fall from an already low starting point. Here are some examples:

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The third tonal symbol is mai jat dta waa or "my jaht dtah wah" [] and the fourth is mai dtii or "my dtee" []. The former looks like a little lowercase m with a tail, and the latter looks like a tiny plus sign. They are both seldom used and change the sound of words to a short "pop"ping sound.