THE NORTHERN THAI DIALECT USED IN CHIANG MAI, THAILAND

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Thailand has main four dialects spoken as the mother tongue in each region. This article will explore how the Northern dialect is used in Chiang Mai. The data was collected from the daily conversation at four public places: local markets, shopping malls, public transportation, and university cafeterias. The mixed method is the sample's non-participation observation and unstructured interview in the four research areas. The research concept is sociocultural linguistics. The research findings disclose that the local people still speak the Northern dialect in public places in the Chiang Mai centre. It is also found that they use the Northern dialect interspersed with the Bangkok language. The topics of conversation were food, travel, costume, study, entertainment, and sports. These issues were related to the place. All places found a large number of Bangkok language speakers. The findings also imply that the Northern dialect has less used than Bangkok in shopping malls and universities. Chiang Mai is an important tourist city, so people all over the country visit or move to this city with their different languages. It would appear in linguistic phenomena of code-mixing or code-switching between the Northern and Bangkok languages in this area, which should be a different research topic.