This paper investigated the names given to Thai local community products and provides a description of the use of the English language in naming products in Thailand. The business names of Thai local products under the program One Tambon One Product (OTOP) were selected for analysis, focusing on language characteristics and semantic appropriateness by using onomastics to some extent. | Kasetsart Journal of Social Sciences 38 2017 123e128 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Kasetsart Journal of Social Sciences journal homepage http locate kjss How Thai businesses utilize English in their product names Navaporn Sanprasert Snodin a Jirajittra Higgins b Surakarn Yoovathaworn c a Department of Foreign Languages Faculty of Humanities Kasetsart University Bangkok 10900 Thailand b Chulalongkorn University Language Institute Chulalongkorn University Bangkok 10330 Thailand c Administrative and Clerical Division Faculty of Science Mahidol University Bangkok 10400 Bangkok a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Article history This paper investigated the names given to Thai local community products and provides a Received 8 April 2016 description of the use of the English language in naming products in Thailand. The Received in revised form 6 October 2016 business names of Thai local products under the program One Tambon One Product Accepted 7 October 2016 OTOP were selected for analysis focusing on language characteristics and semantic Available online 12 April 2017 appropriateness by using onomastics to some extent. The data consisted of 1 304 names from five product categoriesdfood drinks clothing and accessories handicrafts and Keywords ornaments and inedible herbs as provided in the database of tambons and OTOP prod- brand naming ucts. Thai product names in English some of which only Thais can understand show code-mixing language creativity reflecting Thai identity within English usage in the local setting. One Thai local products problematic area concerns the lack of semantic appropriateness of some English names as the names are sometimes not relevant to the product type. Thai entrepreneurs need support in naming their products to achieve international intelligibility if their products are to be marketed to international customers. 2017 Kasetsart University. Publishing services by Elsevier . This is an open access article under
