Tracy McGivern wins the prize for best research!

Origins and related words

One theory of the word's origin derives it from farangset, the Thai pronunciation of français, the French word for 'French' or 'Frenchman'. France was one of the first European nations to establish cultural ties with Thailand in the 17th century, so to Thais at that time, 'white man' and 'Frenchman' were synonymous. Others say that in the Ayutthaya period, land was given to the Portuguese merchants to conduct their business at "Baan Farang" (Guava Village).

Another explanation derives the word from the Persian word farangi which refers to foreigners. It comes from the word "frank", meaning Franks or French. The reason for this is the fact that the French were the first European nation that helped the Ghajar Kings modernize the Iranian government, in particular with the establishment of customs, in Persian: gomrok. Long before English, until around the 1960s, French was the foreign language of choice for educated Iranians. The abundance of French words in the Persian language attests to this fact.

By another account the word comes through Arabic ("Afrandj"), and there are quite a few articles about it. One of the most detailed treatments of the subject is by Rashid al-din Fazl Allâh: See Karl Jahn (ed.) Histoire Universelle de Rasid al-Din Fadl Allah Abul=Khair: I. Histoire des Francs (Texte Persan avec traduction et annotations), Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1951. (Source: M. Ashtiany)

Farang is closely related to the Khmer word Barang.

In Tamil, the word that refers to Europeans (most specifically to the British) is parangiar, presumably because Tamil does not have the "F" sound. Many South Asian and Southeast Asian languages, including Malay, also use this word to denote foreigners.

http://www.farangdingdong.com/ - this is the first link that comes up when you google farang.... ha ha ha

so whilst we all know that wikipedia is dubiuos they seem to have sourced part of this explanation from a text in a publication out of leiden which is a dutch uni...

you may have been onto something with the arabic/ amharic link if any of the above is accurate

happy plagarism

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