การเปลี่ยนแปลงของภาษาไทยถิ่นภูเก็ตปัจจุบันผ่านการสัมผัสภาษาถิ่น

Abstract

This research aimed at analyzing the dialect contact phenomenon in Phuket Thai. The linguistic variables consist of 36 lexical items and two phonological variables: final glottal stop (Ɂ) in long checked syllables and the vowels (ei, əɨ, ou) in open syllables. The data were collected from 120 informants in Phuket province. They were classified into four groups according to their ancestors’ birthplaces: Phuket, Southern Thailand where Eastern Southern Thai is spoken, Southern Thailand where Western Southern Thai is spoken and Central Thailand. Each of these groups was divided into three age groups: over 60 years old, 35-45 years old and 10-20 years old, and, ten informants were selected from each of the three age groups. The informants (four birthplaces x three age groups x 10 persons) were interviewed to obtain informal speech. The result showed that the elderly group (the over 60-year-old group) mostly used the linguistic variants in their ancestors’ dialects. The middle-aged group (the 35-45 year-old group) used a variety of linguistic variants while the young group (the 10-20 year-old group) mostly used the Standard Thai variants. It may be thus concluded that present day Present Day Phuket Thai is tending to converge with Standard Thai.