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.