Isaan - Northeast Thailand Culture & Language

Isaan culture is Lao in its roots, rural in its reference points, and has been exported to the rest of Thailand by migration.

Mor lam

The region’s music and its great cultural export: sung poetry over the khaen, a bamboo mouth organ with a droning, reedy sound that is the instrument of the Lao world. Traditional mor lam involved improvised courtship duels between a man and a woman; the modern electrified version fills stadiums and tours nationally, and its stars are household names. The khaen is UNESCO-listed on the Lao side of the river.

Silk

Isaan produces most of Thailand’s silk, woven in villages on hand looms. Mudmee — ikat, where the threads are tie-dyed before weaving so the pattern emerges in the cloth — is the regional technique, and Queen Sirikit’s patronage from the 1960s turned a declining craft into a substantial rural industry.

Khmer inheritance

The temples are the most visible, but the southern provinces also keep Khmer language, shadow puppetry and the kantrum music that goes with it.

Elephants

The Kuy people of Surin have a centuries-old tradition of capturing and keeping elephants, and the annual round-up is its public face — though the practice raises the welfare questions that all elephant tourism does.

Temple architecture of the Lao world

Isaan’s older temples do not look like central Thai ones. The sim, the ordination hall, is small, low and thick-walled, often with exterior murals painted directly onto the plaster in a bright, unrefined folk style quite unlike the court painting of Bangkok. That Phanom, the great stupa on the Mekong, is built to a Lao rather than a Thai profile and is venerated on both sides of the river.

Rockets and candles

Two festivals unlike anything else in Thailand — see the events section.

Isaan is the majority spoken language — a group of dialects essentially the same as Lao, and not mutually intelligible with central Thai without effort. Almost everyone also speaks standard Thai, learned at school.

Khmer is spoken in Surin, Sisaket and parts of Buriram, and Kuy and Phu Thai are spoken by smaller communities.

English is much less common here than in the tourist regions. Hotel staff in the cities manage; in markets, villages and at the temple sites, expect very little, and a translation app is genuinely useful.

A few words of Isaan go a long way and are received with delight, since visitors never use them: sabai dee bo for how are you, khop chai for thank you, and saep for delicious — the Isaan equivalent of aroy, and the single most useful word you can learn here.