Abstract:
The purpose of this thesis was to study the tone systems and the phonetic characteristics of tone in the Thai dialect spoken in different localities of Chonburi, in order to decide whether this dialect could be divided into sub-dialects. The study dealt with tone at word level. The corpus for this study was recorded from 36 selected informants in 18 localities. The tone system of each locality was carefully analysed an the results were compared. The results of this study showed that the tone systems of various localities0of Chonburi were the same, in each system comprised 5 tones, and their distributions were virtually the same. Therefore, so far as the analysis of tone system was concerned, the Thai dialect of Chonburi could not be divided into sub-dialects. However, after a thorough study , the phonetic characteristics of tone in each group of localities were found to differ evidently from those of tones in other groups. Consequently, it was concluded that it was possible to divide this dialect into sub-dialects, so far as the phonetic characteristics of tones were concerned.