Thai names

Thai names are comparable to the Western European pattern in which the family name follows a first or given name. In this they differ from the family-name-first pattern of the general East Asian tradition.

Thai names, both given name and family, are often long, and there are a great many of them. The diversity of family names is because they are required to be unique to a family, and they are a recent introduction. Also, a certain number of Thai people change their given names relatively frequently (and their last names less frequently, as it requires permission of the head of a family, or in the case of children, both father and mother). This practice is virtually unknown in most other countries outside of marriage and fortune-telling traditions. Besides standard reasons of separation and divorce, many name changes are done in order to get rid of bad luck (which if caused by a ghost or spirit, would confuse the malignant entity, allowing the victim to get free from them.)

Last names became legally required of Thai citizens in 1913. Before then, most Thais used only a first or individual name. The names generally convey positive attributes. Under Thai law, only one family can use any given surname: thus any two people of the same surname must be related.

Thai surnames are often long, particularly among Thais of Chinese descent. For example, the family of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who is of Chinese descent, adopted the name Shinawatra ("does good routinely") in 1938. According to the current law, Person Name Act, BE 2505 (1962), to create a new Thai surname, it must not be longer than ten Thai letters, excluding vowel symbols and diacritics. The same law also forbids the creation of a surname that duplicated any existing surnames, but there are some duplicates dating to the time before computer databases were available to prevent this. Some creations added the name of their location (muban, tambon or amphoe) into surnames, similar to family name suffixes.

As a measure of the diversity of Thai names, in a sample of 45,665 names, 81% of family names were unique, and 35% of given names were unique: the people with shared family names are thus related, and the diversity of given names is conventional.

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