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The International Journal of the Royal Society of Thailand

Volume XVI-2024 (Special Issue)

The modified Royal Society system is used for geographic names, including road names.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs also uses this system to write names in official documents such
as passports. The National Library uses this system too for bibliographic purposes.
Later, the Royal Society again appointed a committee to improve the method of

transliterating Thai into Roman script on January 17, 1986 with an aim to improve the
transliterating of Thai into Roman script. The reason given was that the transliteration of Thai

into Roman script has been increasing. In addition to transliterating geographic names and
proper names for foreigners to read, it is also used in other activities, such as international data
communication, especially the exchange of data using electronic devices, which requires

correctness and accuracy rather than precise pronunciations close to Thai, in line with the
objective of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which emphasizes the
setting of standards for transliterating Thai into Roman script for use in international data

communication. ISO has assigned Thailand, through the Royal Society, to be in charge of this task
and work with the Thai Industrial Standards Institute, Ministry of Industry, to draft a standard for
transliterating Thai into Roman script so that it can be transliterated back into Thai script.

In summary, the Royal Society was entrusted with 2 tasks as follows:
The first task is to create criteria for transliterating Thai into Roman script in the general

system while the second task is to create criteria for transliterating Roman script in the special
system.
The first task was to work with the Royal Survey Department, Royal Thai Armed Forces.

That is, the Royal Survey Department presented the general transliteration criteria (Royal Society,
B.E. 2543) to the United Nations experts on geographic names at the meeting in Berlin, Germany,

held between 27 August-5 September 2002, and it was announced as the standard to replace
the old system that had been approved in 1967.
The second task was to work with the Thai Industrial Standards Institute to propose

Thai language standards to ISO until they were approved and announced as 3 international
standards:
ISO 11940: 1998 Information and Documentation – Transliteration of Thai. Principles for

transliterating Thai characters into Roman script. They must be transliterated back into Thai script
(1 June 1998).
ISO 11940-2: 2007 Information and documentation – Transliteration of Thai characters into

Latin characters – Part 2: Simplified transliteration of Thai language. Principles for word reading
(1 May 2007).

ISO 20674-1: 2019 Information and documentation – Transliteration of scripts in use in
Thailand – Part 1: Transliteration of Akson-Thai-Noi. Principles for transliterating Thai Noi into
Roman script (15 October 2019).

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