Burmese (Myanmar)

Introduction

Burmese, or Myanmar, belongs to the Lolo-Burmese sub-branch of of the Tibeto-Burmese branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. It is not known exactly when the Rangoon Temple Burmese-speaking people arrived in central Burma, but the earliest religious inscriptions in Burmese date back to around 1,000 AD. It is thought that standard Burmese evolved from a dialect spoken in the lower valleys of central Burma. Today, Burmese is spoken with some regional variations by the vast majority of Burmese people.

Throughout its history, Burmese has been in contact with speakers of other languages such as Pali and Mon, one of the earliest groups to occupy Burma in the Burma 12th-13th centuries, and European languages such as Portuguese, Dutch, English and French in the 16th-19th centuries. These languages have all influenced the spoken but not the written form of Burmese. As a result, modern colloquial Burmese used in everyday conversations differs significantly from the formal written form of the language used in textbooks, academic writing, newspapers, fiction, and expository prose. The written version retains many Pali words and syntactic constructions largely absent in the spoken language. In Burmese, the spoken form is called ba-ma, and the written form is called myan-ma. In English, however, it is customary to refer to both forms of the language as Burmese.
Burma

Burmese is the official language of Myanmar (since 1989, the name for Burma). It is spoken by 21.5 million people as a first language, and by another 3 million speakers (mostly minorities in Myanmar) as a second language. Burmese is also spoken in Bangladesh, Malaysia, Thailand, and the U.S. The total Burmese-speaking population of the world is estimated at 32-37 million people (Ethnologue).

In Myanmar, Burmese is used in the media, government administration, and education from kindergarten to the university level. The use of minority languages is suppressed by the authoritarian regime.

Dialects

Standard Burmese is based on the dialect spoken in in the lower valleys of the Irrawaddy and Chindwin rivers. It is spoken in most of the country with slight regional variations. In addition, there are other regional variants that differ from standard Burmese in pronunciation and vocabulary. All dialects are mutually intelligible.

In addition, there are two registers: a formal and a colloquial one. The formal register is used in official publications, radio and TV broadcasts, literary works, and formal speech. The colloquial register is used in daily communications.

Structure

Sound System

Burmese Child

Burmese Boy

Burmese Woman

Burmese Girl

Burmese Man

Burmese Woman

Syllable structure
Like all Sino-Tibetan languages, Burmese has a simple syllable structure that consists of an initial consonant followed by a vowel with an associated tone. There are no final consonants.

Vowels
Burmese has eight vowel phonemes, i.e., sounds that distinguish word meaning.

xx	Front	Central	Back
High	/i/	x	/u/
Mid	/e/	//	/o/
Low	//	/a/	//

In addition, there are four diphthongs: /ei/, /ai/, /ou/, /au/.

Consonants
Burmese has a fairly complex system of consonants characterized by the following features:

a three-way contrast between plain, aspirated, and voiced obstruents, e.g., p - p - b;
a two-way contrast between voiced and voiceless nasals and lateral approximants, such as voiced and voiceless m - m, and voiced and voiceless l - l.
(r) is used only in a few borrowed words.
() is extremely rare.

xxxx	Bilabial	Labio-dental	Dental	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops	p - p -b	x		t - t - d	x	k - k- g	?
Fricatives	xx	f	- ()	x		x	h
Affricates	xxxx	xx	x	xxxx	t - t - d	xxx	xx
Nasals	m - m	xxx	n - n	x	-	-	x
Lateral approximant	xxxxx	xxxxx	xx	l - l	xx	xxx	xxxx
Semivowels	x	xxx	xx	(r)	j	w	xxxx

	th as in thin
	th as in those
	sh as in shop
t	ch as in chop
d	j as in job
	n as in canyon
ŋ	ng as in song
m, n, , -	no equivalents in English

Tones
Burmese is a tonal language. This means that all syllables in Burmese have prosodic features that are an integral part of their pronunciation. Prosodic contrasts involve not only pitch, but also phonation, intensity (loudness), duration, and vowel quality. Burmese has 4 tones (examples below are taken from Wikipedia):

Tone	Notation	Description	Example
Low	à	Normal phonation, medium duration, low intensity, low pitch	kà 'shake'
High	á	Sometimes slightly breathy, relatively long, high intensity, high pitch	ká 'be bitter'
Creaky	a	Tense or creaky phonation (sometimes with lax glottal stop), medium duration, high intensity, high pitch	ka 'fee'
Checked	a?	Centralized vowel quality, final glottal stop, short duration, high pitch (in citation; can vary in context)	ka? 'draw off'

Click here to listen to the pronunciation of the Burmese alphabet.

Grammar

Burmese Man

Burmese Girl

Burmese Man

Burmese is an analytic language which means that grammatical functions are expressed by word order and by postpositional particles rather than by inflections as is the case in Indo-European languages. Particles include subject markers, equivalents of prepositions, and classifiers, i.e., words used in counting. Particles can also have discourse functions, for example, to indicate the topic of a sentence.

Politeness markers
There are various politeness markers. Their use depends on who is speaking to whom, for instance, women use shin 'sir or madam' at the end of a sentence to show respect to the listener, while men khâmja for that purpose.

Noun phrase

Nouns are not marked for gender, number or case.
Modifiers (including relative clauses) precede the nouns they modify, e.g, di mìpon 'this/these lantern(s)'.
Burmese nouns require classifiers for quantifying count nouns. A noun in Burmese can occur with only one classifier. There are dozens of classifiers, and one has to learn which classifier goes with which noun. Numerals and classifiers follow the quantified nouns, e.g., 'tooth four peg', i.e., 'four teeth'.

Verb phrase

Burmese verbs are not conjugated, i.e., they remain unchanged, regardless of person, number, or tense.
Most Burmese verbs consist of a root plus separate particles that represent mood, aspect, tense, positive/negative, and politeness.

Word order
The normal word order in Burmese is Subject-Object-Verb. The verb and its modifiers occupy a final position in a sentence, while all other elements are ordered rather freely before it.

Vocabulary

Burmese Girl

Burmese Monk

In the early stages, Hinduism and Buddhism have had a profound religious and linguistic effect on Burmese. Learned or specialized words which came into the spoken language through the written one often contain Pali loanwords, similar to Latinate words in English. British rule (1886-1937) brought a large number of English words, particularly those related to business, technology, science and politics. Borrowed words are adapted to Burmese phonology. Sometimes, there are competing terms, one borrowed and one native, for instance, , literally 'image-see sound-hear', i.e., 'television'. New words are formed from native elements through compounding, prefixation and reduplication.

Below are a few words and phrases in Burmese (in transliteration)

Mingâlaba. (formal)	Formal greeting at any time of the day
Thwa dau me.	Good bye
Kyeizu pyu yue.	Please.
Kyeizu tin ba de.	Thank you.
Hode.	Yes.
Mahobu.	No.

Below are the numerals 1-10 in Burmese.

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
tiq	hniq	thòun	lè	ngà	c'auq	k'ú- hniq	shiq	kò	s'eh

Writing

Buddha

Burmese Girl

Burmese Monk

Burmese Man

Hinduism and Buddhism have had a profound religious impact on Burmese, and this influence is evident in the orthography that is still in use today. Although Burmese belongs to the Tibeto-Burman branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, Burmese script is an adaptation of the Mon script, which in turn, derived from Pali- the language of Theravada Buddhism, and ultimately from the Brahmi script of India. Because this script was designed to represent the sound system of an Indo-Aryan language, it is not ideally suited to represent the sounds of Burmese. Thus, there are serious discrepancies between the orthography and pronunciation.

Burmese is written with a syllabic script. Its basic unit is a consonant-based syllable with an inherent /a/ vowel which is suppressed by a circular stroke above the character. Burmese is written horizontally from left to right and its basic set of symbols consists of 33 consonants and 14 vowels. Symbols for vowels may be written before, above, below, or to the right of the letter representing an initial consonant. The combinations of consonants and diacritic vowels are often represented by special ligatures. Although Burmese is a tonal language, tones are usually not explicitly indicated, but implied by the vowels. Spaces are used to separate phrases, not words: a single vertical bar marks a small break, a double vertical bar marks the end of a sentence. Burmese has a native set of symbols for the numerals 0 to 9.

The Burmese alphabet consists almost entirely of circles or portions of circles used in various combinations, as can be seen in the sample below. It evolved at a time when letters were traced on palm leaves with a stylus. Straight lines would have torn the leaves. Because of its rounded appearance, it resembles the Indic scripts.

Here is the Burmese equivalent of the phrase "Universal Declaration of Human Rights."

UDHR Burmese

Click here for a lesson in writing Burmese script.

There is no standardized system for romanizing Burmese, despite several attempts dating back to the British colonial regime.

Click here for lessons in writing the Burmese script.

Resources

Click here to find out where Burmese is taught in the United States.
Click here to find materials for studying Burmese.

Online resources for the study of Burmese
Burmese Language Leassons from the SEAsite of Northern Illinois University
UCLA Language Profile for Burmese
Wikipedia article on Burmese language
Ethnologue report on Burmese
Yamada Language Guide for Burmese
Burmese Language Resources
Voice of America - Burmese
BBC - Burmese