Thai^[3], Central Thai^[4], or Siamese^[5], is the national and official language of Thailand and the first language of the Thai people and the vast majority of Thai Chinese. It is a member of the Tai group of the Tai–Kadai language family. Over half of its words are borrowed from Pali, Sanskrit and Old Khmer. It is a tonal and analytic language.
Thai also has a complex orthography and system of relational markers.^{[citation needed]}Spoken Thai is mutually intelligible with Laotian, the language of Laos; the two languages are written with slightly different scripts but are linguistically similar.^[6]