Burmese language
Burmese is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Myanmar, where it is the official language, lingua franca, and the native language of the Bamar, the country's largest ethnic group. The Constitution of Myanmar officially refers to it as the Myanmar language in English, though most English speakers continue to refer to the language as Burmese, after Burma—a name with co-official status until 1989. Burmese is the most widely spoken language in the country, where it serves as the lingua franca. In 2019, Burmese was spoken by 42.9 million people globally, including by 32.9 million speakers as a first language and 10 million as a second language. A 2023 World Bank survey found that 80% of the country's population speaks Burmese. Burmese dialects are also spoken by some of the indigenous tribes in Bangladesh's Chittagong Hill Tracts, China's Yunnan province, and India's northeastern states, as well as by Burmese diaspora.
Burmese is a tonal, pitch-register, and syllable-timed language, largely monosyllabic and agglutinative with a subject–object–verb word order. Burmese is distinguished from other major Southeast Asian languages by its extensive case marking system and rich morphological inventory. It is a member of the Lolo-Burmese grouping of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The Burmese alphabet ultimately descends from a Brahmic script, either the Kadamba or Pallava alphabet.
Classification
Burmese belongs to the Southern Burmish branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages. It is the most widely spoken of the non-Sinitic Sino-Tibetan languages. Burmese was the fifth Sino-Tibetan language to develop a writing system, after Classical Chinese, Pyu, Old Tibetan, and Tangut.Dialects
Most Burmese speakers, who live throughout the Irrawaddy River Valley, use variants of standard Burmese, while a minority speak non-standard dialects found in the peripheral areas of the country. These dialects include:- Tanintharyi Region: Merguese, Tavoyan, and Palaw
- Magway Region: Yaw
- Shan State: Intha, Taungyo, and Danu
Burmese dialects mostly share a common set of tones, consonant clusters, and written script. Several Burmese dialects differ substantially from standard Burmese with respect to vocabulary, lexical particles, and rhymes. Below is a summary of lexical similarity between major Burmese dialects:
| Dialects | Burmese | Danu | Intha | Rakhine | Taungyo |
| Burmese | 100% | 93% | 95% | 91% | 89% |
| Danu | 93% | 100% | 93% | 85–94% | 91% |
| Intha | 95% | 93% | 100% | 90% | 89% |
| Rakhine | 91% | 85–94% | 90% | 100% | 84–92% |
| Taungyo | 89% | N/A | 89% | 84–92% | 100% |
| Marma | N/A | N/A | N/A | 85% | N/A |
Irrawaddy River valley
Spoken Burmese is remarkably uniform among Burmese speakers, particularly those living in the Irrawaddy valley, all of whom use variants of Standard Burmese. The standard dialect of Burmese originates from the Irrawaddy River valley. Regional differences between speakers from Upper Burma, called anya tha and speakers from Lower Burma, called auk tha, largely occur in vocabulary, not pronunciation. Minor lexical and rhyme differences exist throughout the Irrawaddy River valley. For instance, for the term ဆွမ်း, "food offering ", Lower Burmese speakers use instead of, the pronunciation used in Upper Burma.The standard dialect is typified by the Yangon dialect because of the modern city's media influence and economic clout. Formerly, the Mandalay dialect represented standard Burmese. The Mandalay dialect's most noticeable feature is its continued use of the first-person pronoun ကျွန်တော်, kya.nau by both men and women. In Yangon, only male speakers use the same pronoun, while female speakers use ကျွန်မ, kya.ma.. Moreover, with regard to kinship terminology, Upper Burmese speakers differentiate the maternal and paternal sides of a family while Lower Burmese speakers do not.
Mon has also influenced subtle grammatical differences between the varieties of Burmese spoken in Lower and Upper Burma. In Lower Burmese varieties, the verb ပေး is colloquially used as a permissive causative marker, as in other Southeast Asian languages, but unlike in most Tibeto-Burman languages. This usage is hardly used in Upper Burmese varieties and is considered sub-standard.
Outside the Irrawaddy basin
More distinctive nonstandard varieties of Burmese emerge as one moves farther away from the Irrawaddy River valley. These varieties include the Yaw, Palaw, Myeik, Tavoyan and Intha dialects. Despite substantial vocabulary and pronunciation differences, there is mutual intelligibility among most Burmese dialects, especially with language convergence.Dialects in Tanintharyi Region, including Palaw, Merguese, and Tavoyan, are especially conservative compared to Standard Burmese. The Tavoyan and Intha dialects have preserved the medial, which is only found in Old Burmese inscriptions. These dialects also often reduce the intensity of the glottal stop. Beik has 250,000 speakers and Tavoyan 400,000. The grammatical constructs of Burmese dialects in Southern Myanmar show greater Mon influence than Standard Burmese.
The most pronounced feature of the Arakanese language of Rakhine State is its retention of the sound, which has become in standard Burmese. Moreover, Arakanese features a variety of vowel differences, including the merger of the ဧ and ဣ vowels. Hence, a word like "blood" သွေး is pronounced in standard Burmese and in Arakanese.
History
The Burmese language's early forms include Old Burmese and Middle Burmese. Old Burmese dates from the 11th to the 16th century ; Middle Burmese from the 16th to the 18th century ; modern Burmese from the mid-18th century. Burmese phonology has evolved significantly, but word order, grammatical structure, and vocabulary have remained markedly stable well into Modern Burmese, with the exception of lexical content.Old Burmese
The earliest attested form of the Burmese language is Old Burmese, dating to the 11th- and 12th-century stone inscriptions of Pagan. The earliest evidence of the Burmese alphabet dates to 1035, while a casting made in the 18th century of an old stone inscription points to 984.Owing to the linguistic prestige of Old Pyu in the Pagan Kingdom era, Old Burmese borrowed a substantial corpus of vocabulary from Pali via the Pyu language. These indirect borrowings can be traced to orthographic idiosyncrasies in these loanwords, such as the Burmese word "to worship", which is spelt ပူဇော် instead of ပူဇာ, as would be expected by the original Pali orthography.
In the mid-15th century, bilingual Pali-Burmese texts called nissaya emerged. They played a significant role in shaping the standard language, leading Burmese postpositional markers to be reinterpreted as equivalents of Pali inflections, giving them new grammatical roles that were compatible with their original use but not inherent to them. Over time, these markers became integral to the morphological structure of Burmese and were seen as more obligatory in literary Burmese than in colloquial Burmese.
Middle Burmese
The transition to Middle Burmese occurred in the 16th century. The transition included phonological changes as well as accompanying changes in the underlying orthography.From the 1500s onward, Burmese kingdoms saw substantial gains in the populace's literacy rate, which manifested in greater participation of laymen in scribing and composing legal and historical documents, domains that were traditionally the domain of Buddhist monks, and drove the ensuing proliferation of Burmese literature in both genres and works. During this period, the Burmese alphabet began employing cursive-style circular letters typically used in palm-leaf manuscripts as opposed to the square block-form letters used in earlier periods. The orthographic conventions used in written Burmese today can largely be traced to Middle Burmese.
Modern Burmese
Modern Burmese emerged in the mid-18th century. By this time, male literacy in Burma stood at nearly 50%, which enabled the wide circulation of legal texts, royal chronicles, and religious texts. A major reason for the Burmese language's uniformity was the near-universal presence of Buddhist monasteries in Burmese villages. These served as the foundation of the pre-colonial monastic education system, which fostered uniformity of the language throughout the Upper Irrawaddy valley, the traditional homeland of Burmese speakers. The 1891 Census of India, conducted five years after the annexation of the entire Konbaung Kingdom, found that the former kingdom had an "unusually high male literacy" rate of 62.5% for Upper Burmans aged 25 and above. For all of British Burma, the literacy rate was 49% for men and 5.5% for women.The expansion of the Burmese language into Lower Burma also coincided with the emergence of Modern Burmese. As late as the mid-1700s, Mon, an Austroasiatic language, was the principal language of Lower Burma, employed by the Mon people who inhabited the region. Lower Burma's shift from Mon to Burmese was accelerated by the Burmese-speaking Konbaung Dynasty's victory over the Mon-speaking Restored Hanthawaddy Kingdom in 1757. By 1830, an estimated 90% of the population in Lower Burma self-identified as Burmese-speaking Bamars; huge swaths of former Mon-speaking territory, from the Irrawaddy Delta to upriver in the north, spanning Bassein and Rangoon to Tharrawaddy, Toungoo, Prome, and Henzada, were now Burmese-speaking. The language shift has been ascribed to a combination of population displacement, intermarriage, and voluntary changes in self-identification among increasingly Mon–Burmese bilingual populations in the region.
Standardized tone marking in written Burmese was not achieved until the 18th century. From the 19th century onward, orthographers created spellers to reform Burmese spelling because of ambiguities that arose over transcribing sounds that had merged. British rule saw continued efforts to standardize Burmese spelling through dictionaries and spellers.
Britain's gradual annexation of Burma throughout the 19th century, in addition to concomitant economic and political instability in Upper Burma also accelerated the migration of Burmese speakers from Upper Burma into Lower Burma. British rule in Burma eroded the strategic and economic importance of the Burmese language; Burmese was effectively subordinated to the English language in the colonial educational system, especially in higher education.
In the 1930s, the Burmese language saw a linguistic revival, precipitated by the establishment of an independent University of Rangoon in 1920 and the inception of a Burmese language major at the university by Pe Maung Tin, modeled on Anglo Saxon language studies at the University of Oxford. Student protests in December of that year, triggered by the introduction of English into matriculation examinations, fueled growing demand for Burmese to become the medium of education in British Burma; a short-lived but symbolic parallel system of "national schools" that taught in Burmese subsequently launched. The role and prominence of the Burmese language in public life and institutions was championed by Burmese nationalists, intertwined with their demands for greater autonomy and independence from the British in the leadup to Burmese independence in 1948.
The 1948 Constitution of Burma prescribed Burmese as the official language of the newly independent nation. The Burma Translation Society and Rangoon University's Department of Translation and Publication were established in 1947 and 1948, respectively, with the joint goal to modernize the Burmese language in order to replace English across all disciplines. Anti-colonial sentiment throughout the early post-independence era led to a reactionary switch from English to Burmese as the national medium of education, a process accelerated by the Burmese Way to Socialism. In August 1963, the socialist Union Revolutionary Government established the Literary and Translation Commission to standardize Burmese spelling, diction, composition, and terminology. In 1978, the commission compiled the latest spelling authority, the Myanma Salonpaung Thatpon Kyan.
Registers
Diglossia
Burmese is a diglossic language with two distinguishable registers :- Literary High form : the high variety, used in literature, newspapers, radio broadcasts, and formal speeches
- Spoken Low form : the low variety, used in daily conversation, television, comics and literature
| Gloss | Literary HIGH | Spoken LOW |
| "this" | ဤ i | ဒီ di |
| "that" | ထို htui | ဟို hui |
| "at" | ၌ hnai. | မှာ hma |
| plural | များ mya: | တွေ twe |
| possessive | ၏ i. | ရဲ့ re. |
| "and" | နှင့် hnang. | LOW နဲ့ ne. |
| "if" | လျှင် hlyang | ရင် rang |
Historically the literary register was preferred for written Burmese on the grounds that "the spoken style lacks gravity, authority, dignity". In the mid-1960s, some Burmese writers attempted to abandon the literary form in favor of the spoken vernacular form. Some Burmese linguists, such as Minn Latt, a Czech academic, proposed moving away from the high form of Burmese altogether. The literary form is heavily used in written and official contexts, but the recent trend has been to accommodate the spoken form in informal written contexts. Nowadays, television news broadcasts, comics, and commercial publications use the spoken form or a combination of the spoken and simpler, less ornate formal forms.
Burmese uses also distinct spoken and written forms for question pronouns. The following examples demonstrate significant differences in the pronouns, verbs, and other markers used between the literary and spoken forms :
Honorific terms
Burmese has politeness levels and honorifics that take into account the speaker's status and age in relation to the audience. The suffix ပါ is frequently used after a verb to express politeness. Moreover, Burmese pronouns relay varying degrees of deference or respect. Polite speech employs feudal-era third-person pronouns or kinship terms in lieu of first- and second-person pronouns.Honorific vocabulary is used in Burmese to distinguish Buddhist clergy from the laity, especially when speaking to or about bhikkhus. Distinct honorific vocabulary also distinguishes commoners from royals. The honorific markers -တော် and -တော်မူ are suffixed to nouns and verbs, respectively, in relation to Buddhist clergy and royals. Lexical items from standard Burmese, royal vocabulary, and clerical vocabulary are shown side by side in the table below:
Vocabulary
Burmese has primarily inherited its monosyllabic vocabulary from Sino-Tibetan stock. The language has also adopted polysyllabic loanwords from Indo-European languages like Pali and English, as well as sesquisyllabic words from Mon, an Austroasiatic language. Burmese loanwords are overwhelmingly in the form of nouns.Of the Indo-European languages, Pali, the liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism, had the profoundest influence on enriching the Burmese vocabulary. Burmese has readily adopted words of Pali origin; this may be due to phonotactic similarities between the languages and the Burmese script's inherent ability to reproduce Pali spellings with complete accuracy. Pali loanwords are often related to religion, government, arts, and science. Burmese loanwords from Pali primarily take four forms:
- Direct loan: direct import of Pali words with no alteration in orthography
- Abbreviated loan: import of Pali words with accompanied syllable reduction and alteration in orthography, usually by means of a placing a diacritic, called athat အသတ် atop the last letter in the syllable to suppress the consonant's inherent vowel
- Double loan: adoption of two different terms derived from the same Pali word
- Hybrid loan : construction of compounds combining native Burmese words with Pali or combine Pali words
| Category | Gloss | Burmese | Pali |
| Direct loan | 'life' | ဇီဝ jīva | ဇီဝ jīva |
| Direct loan | 'life' | ဘဝ bhava | ဘဝ bhava |
| Direct loan | 'music' | ဂီတ gīta | ဂီတ gīta |
| Abbreviated loan | 'karma' | ကံ kam | ကမ္မ kamma |
| Abbreviated loan | 'dawn' | အရုဏ် aruṇ | အရုဏ' ''aruṇa |
| Abbreviated loan | 'merit' | ကုသိုလ် kusuil | ကုသလ kusala |
| Double loan | 'arrogance' | မာန māna | မာန māna |
| Double loan | 'pride' | မာန် mān | မာန māna |
| Double loan | 'strength' | ဗလ bala | ဗလ bala |
| Double loan | 'leader' | ဗိုလ် buil | ဗလ bala |
| Hybrid loan | 'airplane' | လေယာဉ်ပျံ leyāñpyaṃ | ယာဉ် |
| Hybrid loan | 'name' | နာမည် nā'maññ | နာမ |
Burmese has also adapted numerous words from Mon, traditionally spoken by the Mon people of Lower Burma. Most Mon loanwords are so well assimilated that they are not distinguished as loanwords, as Burmese and Mon were used interchangeably for several centuries in pre-colonial Burma. Mon loans often relate to flora, fauna, administration, textiles, foods, boats, crafts, architecture, and music.
As a natural consequence of British rule in Burma, English has been another major source of vocabulary, especially with regard to technology, measurements, and modern institutions. English loanwords tend to take one of three forms:
- Direct loan: adoption of an English word, adapted to the Burmese phonology
- * "democracy": English democracy → Burmese ဒီမိုကရေစီ
- Neologism or calque: translation of an English word using native Burmese constituent words
- * "human rights": English 'human rights' → Burmese လူ့အခွင့်အရေး
- Hybrid loan: construction of compound words by joining native Burmese words to English words
- * 'to sign': ဆိုင်းထိုး ← ဆိုင်း + ထိုး.
Here is a sample of loan words found in Burmese:
| Gloss | Burmese | Source |
| 'suffering' | ဒုက္ခ | Pali dukkha |
| 'radio' | ရေဒီယို | English radio |
| 'crab' | ကဏန်း | Mon ဂတာံ |
| 'flatter' | ဖော်လံဖား | Hokkien 扶?脬 |
| 'wife' | ဇနီး | Sanskrit जनी |
| 'noodle' | ခေါက်ဆွဲ | Shan ၶဝ်ႈသွႆး |
| 'foot' | ပေ | Portuguese pé |
| 'flag' | အလံ | ʿalam |
| 'storeroom' | ဂိုဒေါင် | Malay gudang |
Since the end of British rule, the Burmese government has attempted to limit usage of Western loans by coining new words. For instance, for the word "television", Burmese publications are mandated to use the term ရုပ်မြင်သံကြား in lieu of တယ်လီဗီးရှင်း, a direct English transliteration. Another example is the word "vehicle", which is officially ယာဉ် but ကား in spoken Burmese. Some previously common English loanwords have fallen out of use with the adoption of indigenous neologisms. An example is the word "university", formerly ယူနီဗာစတီ, from English university'', now တက္ကသိုလ်, a Pali-derived neologism created by the Burmese government and derived from the Pali spelling of Taxila, an ancient university town in modern-day Pakistan.
Some Burmese words have many synonyms, each with specific usages, such as formal, literary, colloquial, and poetic. An example is the word "moon", which can be လ , စန္ဒာ/စန်း , or သော်တာ .
Phonology
Consonants
The consonants of Burmese are as follows:According to, contrary to their use of symbols θ and ð, consonants of သ are dental stops, rather than fricatives or affricates. These phonemes, alongside, are prone to merger with.
An alveolar can occur as an alternate of in some loanwords.
The final nasal is the value of the four native final nasals: , , , , as well as the retroflex and nasalisation mark anusvara demonstrated here above ka which most often stands in for a homorganic nasal word medially as in တံခါး 'door', and တံတား 'bridge', or else replaces final -m in both Pali and native vocabulary, especially after the OB vowel *u e.g. ငံ 'salty', သုံး thóum, and ဆုံး 'end'. It does not, however, apply to which is never realised as a nasal, but rather as an open front vowel or.
The final nasal is usually realised as nasalisation of the vowel. It may also allophonically appear as a homorganic nasal before stops. For example, in , which is pronounced.
Vowels
The vowels of Burmese are:The monophthongs,,, and occur only in open syllables ; the diphthongs,, and occur only in closed syllables. only occurs in a minor syllable, and is the only vowel that is permitted in a minor syllable.
The close vowels and and the close portions of the diphthongs are somewhat mid-centralized in closed syllables, i.e. before and. Thus နှစ် is phonetically and ကြောင် is phonetically.
Tones
Burmese is a tonal language, which means phonemic contrasts can be made on the basis of the tone of a vowel. In Burmese, these contrasts involve not only pitch, but also phonation, intensity, duration, and vowel quality. Some linguists consider Burmese a pitch-register language like Shanghainese. Spoken Burmese exhibits tone sandhi in the form of a shift from a low to an induced creaky tone, to indicate possession.There are four contrastive tones in Burmese. In the following table, the tones are shown marked on the vowel as an example.
| Tone | Burmese | IPA | Symbol | Phonation | Duration | Intensity | Pitch |
| Low | နိမ့်သံ | modal | medium | low | low, often slightly rising | ||
| High | တက်သံ | sometimes slightly breathy | long | high | high, often with a fall before a pause | ||
| Creaky | သက်သံ | tense or creaky, sometimes with lax glottal stop | medium | high | high, often slightly falling | ||
| Checked | တိုင်သံ | centralized vowel quality, final glottal stop | short | high | high |
For example, the following words are distinguished from each other only on the basis of tone:
- Low ခါ "shake"
- High ခါး "be bitter"
- Creaky ခ "to wait upon; to attend on"
- Checked ခတ် "to beat; to strike"
- Low ခံ "undergo"
- High ခန်း "dry up "
- Creaky ခန့် "appoint"
Spoken Burmese exhibits tone sandhi in the form of a shift from a low to an induced creaky tone: to indicate possession and to pronounce low-toned numerals in conjunction with other digits. For the former, this does not occur in literary Burmese, which uses ၏ as postpositional marker for possessive case instead of ရဲ့. Examples include:
Syllable structure
The syllable structure of Burmese is CV, which is to say the onset consists of a consonant optionally followed by a glide, and the rime consists of a monophthong alone, a monophthong with a consonant, or a diphthong with a consonant. The only consonants that can stand in the coda are and. Some representative words are:| Structure | Example | IPA | Meaning |
| CV | မယ် | title for young women | |
| CVC | မက် | 'to crave' | |
| CGV | မြေ | 'earth' | |
| CGVC | မျက် | 'eye' | |
| CVVC | မောင် | term of address for young men | |
| CGVVC | မြောင်း | 'ditch' |
A minor syllable has some restrictions:
- It contains as its only vowel
- It must be an open syllable
- It cannot bear tone
- It has only a simple onset
- It must not be the final syllable of the word
- ခလုတ် 'switch, button'
- ပလွေ 'flute'
- သရော် 'mock'
- ကလက် 'be wanton'
- ထမင်းရည် 'rice-water'
Writing system
Orthographic changes subsequent to shifts in phonology rather than transformations in Burmese grammatical structure and phonology, which by contrast has remained stable between Old Burmese and modern Burmese. For example, during the Pagan era, the medial ္လ was transcribed in writing, which has been replaced by medials ျ and ြ in modern Burmese. Likewise, written Burmese has preserved all nasalized finals, which have merged to in spoken Burmese. Similarly, other consonantal finals have been reduced to. Similar mergers are seen in other Sino-Tibetan languages like Shanghainese and, to a lesser extent, Cantonese.
Written Burmese dates to the early Pagan period. Burmese orthography originally followed a square block format, but the cursive format took hold from the 17th century when increased literacy and the resulting explosion of Burmese literature led to wider use of palm leaves and folded paper known as parabaiks.
Grammar
The basic word order of the Burmese language in syntactic construction is subject-object-verb. Pronouns vary according to the gender and status of the audience and are often omitted. Affixes are used to convey information. Verbs are almost always suffixed and nouns declined.In Burmese, words do not always clearly fall into a part of speech. Generally, words are split into nominals, verbs, adverbs and markers.
Case affixes
Burmese is an agglutinative language with an extensive case system in which nouns are suffixed to determine their syntactic function in a sentence or clause. Sometimes the case markers are different between the two registers.The case markers are:
| High register | Low register | |
| Subject | thi, ká, hma | ha, ká |
| Object | ko | ko |
| Recipient | à | ko |
| Allative | thó | ko |
| Ablative | hmá, ká | ká |
| Locative | hnai, hma, twin | hma |
| Comitative | hnín | né |
| Instrumental | hpyin, hnin | né |
| Possessive | í | yé |
Verbs
The roots of Burmese verbs almost always have affixes that convey information like tense, aspect, intention, politeness, mood, etc. Many affixes also have formal/literary and colloquial equivalents. In fact, the only case in which no suffix is attached to a verb is in imperative commands.Property verbs
Burmese does not have adjectives per se. Rather, it has verbs that carry the meaning "to be X", where X is equivalent to an English adjective. These verbs, called property verbs, can modify a noun by means of the suffix တဲ့ tai. in colloquial Burmese, which is suffixed as follows:Property verbs may also form a compound with the noun and reduplicated with a verb to form an adverb (e.g. ကောင်ကောင်းသွား kaun kaun thwa: meaning "to go well".
Comparatives are usually ordered: X + ထက်ပို htak pui + adjective, where X is the object being compared to. Superlatives are indicated with the prefix အ a. + adjective + ဆုံး hcum:.
Nouns
s in Burmese are pluralized by suffixing တွေ twe in colloquial Burmese or များ mya: in formal Burmese. The suffix တို့ tou., which indicates a group of persons or things, is also suffixed to the modified noun. Unlike in English, mass nouns can be modified with plural markers. An example is below:Plural suffixes are not used when the noun is quantified with a number, instead a measure word or classifier is used.
Numerical classifiers
Burmese uses numerical classifiers when nouns are counted or quantified. This is similar to neighboring languages like Thai, Bengali, and Chinese. Measure words are like English expressions such as "two slices of bread" or "a cup of coffee". Classifiers are required when counting nouns, so ကလေး ၅ hka.le: nga: is incorrect, since the measure word for people ယောက် yauk is missing; it must suffix the numeral.The standard word order of quantified words is: quantified noun + numeral adjective + classifier, except in round numbers, in which the word order is flipped, where the quantified noun precedes the classifier: quantified noun + classifier + numeral adjective. The only exception to this rule is the number 10, which follows the standard word order.
Measurements of time, such as "hour", နာရီ "day", ရက် or "month", လ do not require classifiers.
Below are some of the most commonly used classifiers in Burmese.
| Burmese | MLC | IPA | Usage | Remarks |
| ယောက် | yauk | for people | Used in informal context | |
| ဦး | u: | for people | Used in formal context and also used for monks and nuns | |
| ပါး | pa: | for people | Used exclusively for monks and nuns of the Buddhist order | |
| ကောင် | kaung | for animals | ||
| ခု | hku. | general classifier | Used with almost all nouns except for animate objects | |
| လုံး | lum: | for round objects | ||
| ပြား | pra: | for flat objects | ||
| စု | cu. | for groups | Can be. |
Affixes
Burmese makes prominent use of affixes —words affixed to words to indicate tense, aspect, case, formality etc. Clausal affixes often indicate various notions that do not directly translate to English, like insistence and emphasis. For example, the affix ဆို conveys the speaker's attitude to the situation questioning the speaker and can be translated as "didn't you say that...". Affixes also indicate the mood of the clause. For example, စမ်း is a suffix used to indicate the imperative mood. While လုပ်ပါ does not indicate the imperative, လုပ်စမ်းပါ does.Some affixes modify the word's part of speech. Among the most prominent of these is the prefix အ, which is prefixed to verbs to form nouns or adverbs. For instance, the word ဝင် means "to enter", but combined with အ, it means "entrance" အဝင်. Moreover, in colloquial Burmese, there is a tendency to omit the second အ in words that follow the pattern အ + noun/adverb + အ + noun/adverb, like အဆောက်အအုံ, which is pronounced and formally pronounced.
Pronouns
Burmese exhibits pronoun avoidance. Pronouns are avoided for politeness, with kinship terms, titles, or other forms of address used instead, This is called "negative politeness": speakers avoid directly addressing people. Pronouns account for social distinctions linguistically, reflecting gender, relative age, kinship, social status, and intimacy. Burmese kinship terms are commonly substituted for pronouns. For example, an older person may use ဒေါ်လေး dau le: or ဦးလေး u: lei: to refer to himself, while a younger person may use either သား sa: or သမီး sa.mi: .Burmese has developed an elaborate hierarchical system of pronouns that are grammatically underspecified, but highly marked for the complex relation between speaker and addressee according to their relative social position. In Burmese, the polite forms of first-person pronouns ကျွန်တော် for males, and ကျွန်မ for females humble the speaker, while the polite forms of second-person pronouns မင်း, ခင်ဗျား or ရှင် elevate the addressee. The original pronouns ငါ nga and နင် nang have been relegated to use with people of higher or equivalent status, although most speakers prefer to use third-person pronouns.
Burmese also uses case markers to mark subject pronouns, although these are generally dropped in spoken Burmese.
The basic pronouns are:
Burmese also uses religious personal pronouns, often reserved for speaking with Buddhist monks and nuns with its own set of complexity.
Kinship terms
Kinship terms vary across Burmese dialects. Upper Burmese dialects still differentiate maternal and paternal sides of a family, unlike Lower Burmese dialects:| Term | Upper Burmese | Lower Burmese | Myeik dialect |
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In a testament to the power of media, the Yangon-based speech is gaining currency even in Upper Burma. Upper Burmese-specific usage, while historically and technically accurate, is increasingly viewed as distinctly rural or regional speech. In fact, some usages are already considered strictly regional Upper Burmese speech and are likely to die out. For example:
In general, the male-centric names of old Burmese for familial terms have been replaced in standard Burmese with formerly female-centric terms, which are now used by both sexes. One holdover is the use of ညီ and မောင်. Terms like နောင် and နှမ now are used in standard Burmese only as part of compound words like ညီနောင် or မောင်နှမ.
Reduplication
is prevalent in Burmese and is used to intensify or weaken property verbs' meanings. For example, if ချော "beautiful" is reduplicated, then the intensity of the verb's meaning increases. Many Burmese words, especially verbs with two syllables, such as လှပ "beautiful", when reduplicated become adverbs. This is also true of some Burmese verbs and nouns, which become adverbs when reduplicated.Some nouns are also reduplicated to indicate plurality. For instance, ပြည် , but when reduplicated to အပြည်ပြည်, it means "many countries", as in အပြည်ပြည်ဆိုင်ရာ . Another example is အမျိုး, which means "a kind", but the reduplicated form အမျိုးမျိုး means "multiple kinds".
A few measure words can also be reduplicated to indicate "one or the other":
- ယောက် → တစ်ယောက်ယောက်
- ခု → တစ်ခုခု
Numerals
Burmese numerals follow the nouns they modify, with the exception of round numbers, which precede the nouns they modify and are subject to tone sandhi shifts.
Romanization and transcription
Burmese has no official romanization system. There have been attempts to make one, but none has succeeded. Replicating Burmese sounds in Latin script is complicated. The Pali-based transcription system MLC, devised by the Myanmar Language Commission, transcribes only sounds in formal Burmese and is based on the Burmese alphabet rather than the phonology.Several colloquial transcription systems have been proposed but none is overwhelmingly preferred.
Transcription of Burmese is not standardized, as seen in the varying English transcriptions of Burmese names. For instance, a Burmese personal name like ဝင်း may be variously romanized as Win, Winn, Wyn, or Wynn, while ခိုင် may be romanized as Khaing, Khine, or Khain.
Computer fonts and standard keyboard layout
The Burmese alphabet can be entered from a standard QWERTY keyboard and is supported by the Unicode standard, meaning it can be read and written on most modern computers and smartphones.Burmese has complex character rendering requirements, where tone markings and vowel modifications are noted with diacritics. These can be placed before consonants, above them, or around them. These character clusters are built with multiple keystrokes. In particular, the inconsistent placement of diacritics as a feature of the language presents a conflict between an intuitive WYSIWYG typing approach and a logical consonant-first storage approach.
Since its introduction in 2007, the most popular Burmese font, Zawgyi, has been near-ubiquitous in Myanmar. Linguist Justin Watkins argues that its ubiquitous use harms Myanmar languages, including Burmese, by preventing efficient sorting, searching, processing and analyzing Myanmar text through flexible diacritic ordering.
Zawgyi is not Unicode-compliant, but occupies the same code space as Unicode Myanmar font. As it is not defined as a standard character encoding, Zawgyi is not built in to any major operating systems as standard. However, allow for its position as the de facto standard within the country, telcos and major smartphone distributors ship phones with Zawgyi font overwriting standard Unicode-compliant fonts, which are installed on most internationally distributed hardware. Facebook also supports Zawgyi as an additional language encoding for their app and website. As a result, almost all SMS alerts, social media posts, and other web resources may be incomprehensible on these devices without the custom Zawgyi font installed at the operating system level. These may include devices purchased overseas or distributed by companies that do not customize software for the local market.
Keyboards with a Zawgyi layout are the most commonly available for purchase domestically.
Until recently, Unicode compliant fonts have been more difficult to type than Zawgyi, as they have a stricter, less forgiving and arguably less intuitive method for ordering diacritics. However, intelligent input software such as Keymagic and recent versions of smartphone soft-keyboards including Gboard and ttKeyboard allow for more forgiving input sequences and Zawgyi keyboard layouts which produce Unicode-compliant text.
A number of Unicode-compliant Burmese fonts exist. The national standard keyboard layout is known as the Myanmar3 layout, and it was published along with the Myanmar3 Unicode font. The layout, developed by the Myanmar Unicode and NLP Research Center, has a smart input system to cover the complex structures of Burmese and related scripts.
In addition to the development of computer fonts and standard keyboard layout, much research remains to be done on Burmese, specifically for Natural Language Processing areas like WordNet, Search Engine, development of parallel corpus for Burmese, and development of a formally standardized and dense domain-specific corpus of Burmese.
The Myanmar government has designated 1 October 2019 as "U-Day" to officially switch to Unicode. The full transition is estimated to take two years.
Example text
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Burmese:လူတိုင်းသည် တူညီ လွတ်လပ်သော ဂုဏ်သိက္ခာဖြင့် လည်းကောင်း၊ တူညီလွတ်လပ်သော အခွင့်အရေးများဖြင့် လည်းကောင်း၊ မွေးဖွားလာသူများ ဖြစ်သည်။ ထိုသူတို့၌ ပိုင်းခြား ဝေဖန်တတ်သော ဉာဏ်နှင့် ကျင့်ဝတ် သိတတ်သော စိတ်တို့ရှိကြ၍ ထိုသူတို့သည် အချင်းချင်း မေတ္တာထား၍ ဆက်ဆံကျင့်သုံးသင့်၏။The romanization of the text into the Latin alphabet:Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English:
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.