The 44 Thai Consonants

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, 9 middle class consonants, and 11 high class consonants; 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.