There are 44 consonant symbols in the Thai alphabet which produce 21 initial consonant sounds when used at the beginning of a syllable and 6 final consonant sounds when used at the end of a syllable. There are 24 low class consonants (shown in green below), 9 middle class consonants (yellow), and 11 high class consonants (red); the classes are important for determining the tone which a syllable should be spoken with. Since many of the consonants produce the same sound, each consonant has an acrophonic word that is conventionally used to uniquely identify it.
The initial and final phonemic transcriptions given below are used consistently throughout Thai-language.com when the default transcription option is selected in the site control panel.1 Our system uses /g-/ instead of /k-/ or /kh-/ for the Thai consonant ก, but remember, in Thai, a /g-/ sound is always hard. In English it can be either soft (as in gentle) or hard (as in grapple).