Nobody can check your Pali

The charge is ดัดจริต. Affected. Putting it on.

And the reason it is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing is that somebody has now measured it, in a controlled design, on Thai listeners — and the result is more interesting than either side of the argument expects.

What Thai listeners actually do

In 2021 two researchers at Chulalongkorn University published the first study to look directly at Thai attitudes to Thai-English mixing. Earlier work had touched it in passing; nobody had made it the object.

The method is a verbal guise. Forty Thai speakers of Generation Y heard recordings of test sentences and rated the speaker — not the language — on social attractiveness and on social status, using a seven-point scale. The point of the design is that it is the same speaker every time, and the listeners do not know that. They think they are judging people. What is actually varying is the sentence.

The ranking that came out, most positively rated first: Thai only at 5.66, a single English word inserted at 5.24, switching between sentences at 5.21, switching a phrase at 4.96, English only at 4.84, and switching a set expression at 4.75.

Two things follow, and they pull in opposite directions.

First, the complaint is real. Thai-only sentences were rated higher than every mixed form, and the gap was statistically significant against all five of them. Thai listeners do dock you for mixing. That is not an internet mood; it is a measured effect.

Second, every single form scored above the midpoint of the scale. The whole range sits between 4.75 and 5.66 on a scale whose neutral point is 4. Nobody was condemned. This is a preference ordering, not a verdict — and the study’s authors read it as attitudes in transition, moving upward from a period when mixed speech was treated as having no prestige at all.

And then there is the ordering itself, which is where it gets interesting.

Speaking English outright costs you more than mixing

Look at where English-only sits: fifth of six, below both single-word insertion and inter-sentential switching.

So the penalty is not for using English. If it were, the pure-English sentence would be the worst offender and it is not. What draws the strongest reaction is switching a whole set expression — the lowest-rated form in the study.

The study also separated the two things it was measuring, and they came apart.

English-only scored 4.06 on social attractiveness — the lowest figure anywhere in the study — and 5.6 on social status. One participant: hard to understand, some of the words I don’t get; it suits people at the same level of knowledge. Another, on the same recording: looks clever.

Switching between sentences scored 4.62 on attractiveness and 5.8 on status — the highest status score of any mixed form. It’s not ugly at all if it’s used appropriately, because it makes you look knowledgeable. My boss uses it in meetings all the time; I’ve got used to it, it looks stylish, and I’ve started doing it myself. Using it looks expensive.

That split is the finding, and it is the closest thing to a measurement of ดัดจริต that exists.

Mixing buys you standing and costs you warmth. The listener’s rating of your education and wealth goes up. Their rating of whether they like you goes down. ดัดจริต is the name for a trade the listener has noticed you making.

Only one form escaped the trade. A single English word dropped into a Thai sentence scored 5.27 on attractiveness and 5.28 on status — the only sentence type that was rated well on both.

⚠️ One study, forty participants, all women aged 27 to 45, recruited in 2020. Everything above is what that sample did. It is the only direct evidence there is, and it should not be asked to carry more than it can.

And here is the part nobody has put together

The Thai ranking lines up with the sociolinguistic hierarchy of difficulty, and the alignment is close enough to be worth stating.

Shana Poplack’s 1980 study of twenty Puerto Rican bilinguals in East Harlem is the foundational paper on this. She examined 1,835 switches and reported what she called an elementary but crucial finding: there were virtually no ungrammatical combinations of the two languages, regardless of the bilingual ability of the speaker.

She proposed two constraints. The free morpheme constraint: codes may be switched after any constituent in discourse, provided that constituent is not a bound morpheme — so EAT-iendo, an English stem with a Spanish ending, does not occur. The equivalence constraint: switches tend to occur where juxtaposing the two languages does not violate a syntactic rule of either, at points where the surface structures map onto each other.

These models are contested and it matters to say so. There are documented counterexamples in both directions, and Hindi-English switching is the standard case cited against the equivalence constraint.

But Poplack’s central result is not really about the constraints. It is about who switches how.

She found three types of switching, each reflecting a different degree of bilingual ability. Non-fluent bilinguals switch frequently and stay grammatical — by favouring tags and set expressions, the low-risk forms. The switches that happen inside a sentence are the risky ones, and those are produced by the speakers she calls true bilinguals: people who learned both languages in early childhood and have the most contact with the monolingual English world.

Her conclusion is worth quoting properly, because this article previously paraphrased it into something stronger than she wrote:

code-switching is a verbal skill requiring a large degree of linguistic competence in more than one language, rather than a defect arising from insufficient knowledge of one or the other

Not “equivalent to monolingual competence”. A verbal skill, rather than a defect. And she adds the observation that does the work here: precisely those switch types traditionally considered most deviant by investigators and educators — the ones inside a single sentence — are the ones that require the most skill.

Now set the two studies beside each other.

The form Poplack identifies as requiring the most skill is the form Thai listeners rate best. The single English word inside a Thai sentence: 5.24 overall, and the only form to score well on both status and likeability.

And the form Thai listeners rate worst is the one Poplack’s constraint says should barely happen. She treats idiomatic expressions as behaving like bound morphemes — they show a strong tendency to be uttered monolingually — and found fewer than five switches inside them, under 1% of her data. The Thai study’s lowest-rated sentence type is exactly that: the switched set expression.

Thai listeners are not, on this evidence, punishing English. They are punishing the switch that sounds wrong — and “sounds wrong” turns out to have a grammatical definition that nobody in the argument has ever heard of.

⚠️ This is a comparison between two studies in two languages forty years apart, and it is this site’s own observation, not a finding either paper makes. It is offered as a pattern worth testing, not as a result.

And you have been doing it all along

Poplack’s free-morpheme constraint exists partly to distinguish code-switching from borrowing. Borrowing operates in the lexicon; switching operates at the level of syntax and utterance construction. They are different processes.

And Thai has borrowed enormously. คอมพิวเตอร์. เช็ค. ฟอร์ม. โอเค. เบรก. แอร์. Nobody has ever been called ดัดจริต for saying คอมพิวเตอร์, because it has been naturalised — Thai phonology has absorbed it, and it is simply a Thai word now.

So the objection is not to English material in Thai speech. Thai speech is full of it and always has been.

The objection is to a zone — words that have not yet been naturalised. And the boundary of that zone moves. The Thai study’s authors say so directly: these forms are in a period of change, upward, from having been treated as lacking prestige. What is affectation in one decade is unremarkable in the next.

The reasons that have nothing to do with status

Two of the standard explanations are simply about the job the words do.

Fishman’s domain model observes that bilingual speakers select a code according to where they are and what they are discussing. Not according to whom they wish to impress. A Thai working in software, finance, medicine or logistics operates in a domain where the vocabulary arrived in English and the Thai equivalents are either descriptive phrases or nonexistent. Research on Thai-English switching in online teaching found exactly this: switching to English technical terminology that has no established Thai equivalent.

And one motivation listed throughout the literature is straightforwardly practical: a speaker cannot express something adequately in one language, so switches to work around it. That applies to everybody, in every bilingual community on earth.

“Deadline” is not a status claim. It is one word standing in for a Thai phrase.

But sometimes it is exactly what you think it is

The article would be dishonest if it stopped there, because the folk charge is not baseless.

Myers-Scotton’s Markedness Model proposes that speakers choose a code that marks their rights and obligations relative to the others present. Many sociolinguists object that this assumes too much rationality — but nobody disputes that code choice carries social meaning.

Howard Giles’s communication accommodation theory describes speakers converging their speech towards someone whose approval they seek, and diverging to emphasise distance. Peter Auer goes further: code-switching does not merely reflect a social situation, it creates one.

So yes. Language choice can be a status move. That is not a Thai folk prejudice; it is in the textbooks — and in the Thai data, where switching between sentences scored 5.8 for the speaker’s education and wealth while scoring 4.62 for whether the listener warmed to them.

Where the folk charge is wrong, and where this article was

The folk charge says the mixing proves the motive. It does not. The identical form is produced by a doctor reaching for a technical term, an engineer using the vocabulary of her field, and somebody performing sophistication at a dinner table. You cannot read the motive off the sentence.

But an earlier version of this article went further than that, and further than the evidence allows. It said the accusation is triggered by the perceived gap between the register and the person, not by the number of English words — that you are inferring it entirely from the speaker.

The verbal-guise design is precisely the test of that claim, and it does not support it. The speaker is held constant. The person is the same person on every recording. And the ratings still move, significantly, with the form of the sentence. Listeners are responding to what was said, not only to who they imagine is saying it.

A second claim went the same way. The earlier version implied that professional speakers escape the accusation — that the surgeon saying “CT scan” is exempt in a way the diner is not. The Thai study tested exactly that, splitting its participants by whether their occupation involved much English and by their own level of English, and found no statistically significant difference on any sentence type. Occupational domain was related to attitudes somewhat — the two groups differed in which form they liked least — but not enough for the authors to say it influenced them.

So the honest position is narrower than the one this article started with. Form matters, measurably. Who is speaking may matter too, but the one study that looked did not find it. What remains is that ดัดจริต is delivered in the grammar of a judgement about language while carrying the content of a judgement about standing — and that is worth knowing, because the two are argued very differently. You can win an argument about someone’s grammar. You cannot win an argument about whether they are entitled to their own manner.

And the thing that changed

Borrowed vocabulary has carried status in Thai for as long as there has been Thai. Pali and Sanskrit for religion, learning and royalty. Khmer for the court register. Chinese for commerce. Using the borrowed word instead of the plain one has always been how a Thai speaker signalled education, refinement or standing.

So the practice is not new. What is new is one thing, and this is where the article stops describing and starts arguing.

Nobody could check your Pali.

If you deployed a Sanskrit-derived word to sound learned, the listener had no way to assess whether you had used it well. The prestige language was, for practical purposes, unauditable — which meant the claim it made was unfalsifiable and therefore uncontested.

English is not like that. Every Thai in the room studied it at school. The listener can hear the accent, notice the misuse, catch the word deployed slightly wrong. For the first time in the history of Thai status-marking, the audience can mark the paper.

⚠️ That is this site’s argument and no study tests it. It fits what the Thai data shows — that the sharpest reaction falls on the set expression, the form where getting it wrong is most audible — but fitting is not evidence. And the historical half rests on nothing measured here at all. An earlier version of this article supported it by citing article 151’s finding that every Thai word for wealth was borrowed. That finding was withdrawn on 8 September 2026 as false — the Royal Society Dictionary records รวย, a current native word for rich — and the citation has been removed. What remains is the uncontroversial observation that Thai has drawn its prestige registers from Pali, Sanskrit, Khmer and Chinese, which this article asserts without sourcing it.

What can be said with the data is smaller and more useful. The complaint is real, it is graded, and it is easing. The forms Thai listeners judge most harshly are the ones that are hardest to bring off. The form they judge best is the one that takes the most skill. And the whole distribution sits on the positive side of the scale, moving upward from a time when it did not.

The mixing is not new. Neither, probably, is the complaint. What is new is that somebody finally counted.

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Common misconceptions

“It means their Thai is weak.” Poplack found virtually no ungrammatical combinations in 1,835 switches and concluded that switching is a verbal skill requiring a large degree of competence in more than one language, rather than a defect.

“It’s random.” It is rule-governed. Switches cluster at points where both grammars permit them, and the structures the constraints forbid are close to absent from the data.

“Real bilinguals don’t mix.” Poplack found the opposite: the riskiest switches, inside a single sentence, are produced by the most fluent speakers in her sample.

“Saying คอมพิวเตอร์ is different.” It is — that is borrowing, which operates in the lexicon. But the boundary moves, and the Thai study’s authors say attitudes are currently moving in favour of the mixed forms.

“Thai people hate it.” When forty Thai listeners were tested, every mixed form scored above the neutral point of the scale. Plain Thai scored higher than all of them, but nothing was rejected.

“They think you sound stupid.” They rated the code-switching speaker higher on education and wealth and lower on likeability. It is not a competence judgement.

“So nobody is ever showing off.” Some are. Code choice carries social meaning and the literature says so. The error is treating the sentence as proof of the motive.