Frequency of occurrence of phonemes and syllables in Thai: Analysis of spoken and written corpora

This work provides detailed frequency and distribution of Thai phonemes, biphones, and syllable types drawn from three large-scale Thai corpora (InterBEST, LOTUS-BN, and LOTUS-Cell 2.0). Comparisons are carried out to examine an extent to which linguistic variation, associated with different corpus types (written vs. spoken), affects frequency statistics and distribution patterns. Results and statistical analysis show that there is a high correlation in terms of occurrence frequency and distribution in the case of tones and syllable types. However, large degrees of discrepancy exist among the data sets of initial consonants, vowels, and final consonants. Comparisons of this type are needed for other languages to reliably show the degrees to which different types of language corpus and linguistic variation contribute to variability in phoneme frequency and distribution.