I knew what a farang was already, but quickly learned that, like many racial terms, the meaning was not always positive. You can read more about all this here, but I wanted to share one excerpt from the Next Life in the Afternoon blog:

Farang means something on the order of “honkey,” had the term honkey caught on. Let’s be honest – beyond those two years sometime in the 1970s, nobody has heard or used that term with any seriousness or regularity.

Farang is the designation Thais use for most non-Asian foreigners. More specifically, a stereotypical farang has light skin, blonde hair and blue eyes. Ironically, as I pointed out to my Thai friend Nut, those features are the same as you see in Siamese cats.

That brought no end of hilarity, it seemed for a little while. Farang cat, not Siamese cat. Good times.

There is some thought that the term farang may have come about in the early days of French colonialism, when missionaries came to civilize people through religion. Well, that was their intention. I am not saying they were more civilized, probably just more arrogant.

The Thai word for French sounds like, “farangsayt,” and these people were known as farangs, as farang is also the word for “foreign.” So there are at least two competing etymologies for this, and I understand that the true etymology is a contested issue among linguists.

If you know anything about Thai language etymologies, I would love to be set straight on this issue, so please email me with any insights.

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