Hello or Hallo?
People in the cities like Pattaya and Bangkok are used to hearing the foreign word hello. I spent the first year or so of my new life in Pattaya, which is home to tens of thousands of expats, all of whom use hello every day.
Then I moved to the remote village which I was to make my home. When I passed people in the street, I would hold up my hand in greeting and say hello cheerily. However, I couldn’t understand why I would get a smile but no reply.
This went on for years. I asked many people — Thais and foreigners — but nobody knew the reason.
The Final ‘L’ in a Syllable
Then, one day, I noticed something. Thais don’t say football — they say footban. I wondered if there was a relationship.
My Teach Yourself Thai book told me that Thais don’t — or can’t — pronounce L as the final consonant of a word (or syllable). So hello becomes hen-lo.
However, hello is the American version of hallo, and the Thais were always more influenced by Britain than America, going back to Rama V in the Victorian era.
Hello, Hallo, Han-lo or Her-ro?
So, Thais say han-lo, but only over the phone — not face to face. This was how hallo was meant to be used when the telephone was invented. It was the recommended response on picking up the phone.
So that answers that question, but here is another. You can sometimes hear people answer the phone with her-ro. Why?
Because Thais often replace an R with an L. I assume some partially educated people, who know that han-lo is wrong, over-compensate by replacing the correct L with R — much like some Brits used to add an H to a word starting with a vowel because they didn’t know how to spell it. 🙂