Burmese language

Burmese
Myanmar
မြန်မာဘာသာစကား
Native to	Myanmar Thailand China (Dehong) India (Mizoram, Manipur and Tripura)
Speakers	L1: 33 million (2019)[1] L2: 10 million (no date)[1]
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Tibeto-Burman Lolo-Burmese Burmish Burmese
Early forms	Old Burmese Middle Burmese
Writing system	Mon–Burmese script (Burmese alphabet) Burmese Braille
Official status
Official language in	Myanmar
Regulated by	Myanmar Language Commission
Language codes
ISO 639-1	my
ISO 639-2	bur (B) mya (T)
ISO 639-3	mya – inclusive code Individual codes: mya – Myanmar int – Intha tco – Taungyo rki – Rakhine rmz – Marma tvn – Tavoyan dialects
Glottolog	mran1234
Linguasphere	77-AAA-a
Areas where Burmese is spoken (dark blue signifies areas where it is more widely spoken). This map does not indicate whether the language is a majority or minority.

This article contains Burmese script. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Burmese script.

Burmese (မြန်မာဘာသာစကား (or) ဗမာဘာသာစကား) is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Myanmar,^[2] 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,^[3] though most English speakers continue to refer to the language as Burmese, after Burma—a name with co-official status until 1989 (see Names of Myanmar). Burmese is the most widely-spoken language in the country, where it serves as the lingua franca.^[4] In 2019, Burmese was spoken by 42.9 million people globally, including by 32.9 million speakers as a first language, and an additional 10 million speakers as a second language.^[5][2] A 2023 World Bank survey found that 80% of the country's population speaks Burmese.^[6] Burmese dialects are also spoken by the indigenous tribes in Bangladesh's Chittagong Hill Tracts, China's Yunnan province, India's northeastern states, and the Burmese diaspora.

Burmese is a tonal, pitch-register, and syllable-timed language,^[7] 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.^[8][9] It is a member of the Lolo-Burmese grouping of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The Burmese alphabet is ultimately descended from a Brahmic script, either the Kadamba or Pallava alphabets.

Burmese belongs to the Southern Burmish branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages.^[10] Burmese is the most widely spoken of the non-Sinitic Sino-Tibetan languages.^[10] Burmese was the fifth of the Sino-Tibetan languages to develop a writing system, after Classical Chinese, Pyu, Old Tibetan and Tangut.^[10]

The majority of 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 (Myeik, Beik), Tavoyan (Dawei), and Palaw
• Magway Region: Yaw
• Shan State: Intha, Taungyo, and Danu

Arakanese in Rakhine State and Marma in Bangladesh are also sometimes considered dialects of Burmese and sometimes as separate languages.

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:^[11]

Spoken Burmese is remarkably uniform among Burmese speakers,^[12] particularly those living in the Irrawaddy valley, all of whom use variants of Standard Burmese. The standard dialect of Burmese (the Mandalay-Yangon dialect continuum) originates from the Irrawaddy River valley. Regional differences between speakers from Upper Burma (e.g., Mandalay dialect), called anya tha (အညာသား) and speakers from Lower Burma (e.g., Yangon dialect), called auk tha (အောက်သား), largely occur in vocabulary choice, not in pronunciation. Minor lexical and rhyme differences exist throughout the Irrawaddy River valley.^[13] For instance, for the term ဆွမ်း, "food offering [to a monk]", Lower Burmese speakers use [sʰʊ́ɰ̃] instead of [sʰwáɰ̃], which is 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. In the past, the Mandalay dialect represented standard Burmese. The most noticeable feature of the Mandalay dialect is its continued use of the first-person pronoun ကျွန်တော်, kya.nau [tɕənɔ̀] by both men and women. In Yangon, only male speakers use the same pronoun, while female speakers use ကျွန်မ, kya.ma. [tɕəma̰]. Moreover, with regard to kinship terminology, Upper Burmese speakers differentiate the maternal and paternal sides of a family, whereas Lower Burmese speakers do not.

Mon has also influenced subtle grammatical differences between the varieties of Burmese spoken in Lower and Upper Burma.^[14] In Lower Burmese varieties, the verb ပေး ('to give') is colloquially used as a permissive causative marker, similar to other Southeast Asian languages, but unlike in most Tibeto-Burman languages.^[14] This usage is hardly used in Upper Burmese varieties, and is considered a sub-standard construct.^[14]

More distinctive non-standard varieties of Burmese emerge as one moves farther away from the Irrawaddy River valley toward peripheral areas of the country. These varieties include the Yaw, Palaw, Myeik (Merguese), 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 in comparison to Standard Burmese. The Tavoyan and Intha dialects have preserved the /l/ 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^[15] while Tavoyan has 400,000. The grammatical constructs of Burmese dialects in Southern Myanmar show greater Mon influence than Standard Burmese.^[14]

The most pronounced feature of the Arakanese language of Rakhine State is its retention of the [ɹ] sound, which has become [j] in standard Burmese. Moreover, Arakanese features a variety of vowel differences, including the merger of the ဧ [e] and ဣ [i] vowels. Hence, a word like "blood" သွေး is pronounced [θwé] in standard Burmese and [θwí] in Arakanese.

The Burmese language's early forms include Old Burmese and Middle Burmese. Old Burmese dates from the 11th to the 16th century (Pagan to Ava dynasties); Middle Burmese from the 16th to the 18th century (Toungoo to early Konbaung dynasties); modern Burmese from the mid-18th century to the present. While Burmese phonology has evolved significantly, word order, grammatical structure, and vocabulary have remained markedly stable well into Modern Burmese, with the exception of lexical content (e.g., function words).^[16][17][18]

The earliest attested form of the Burmese language is called Old Burmese, dating to the 11th and 12th century stone inscriptions of Pagan. The earliest evidence of the Burmese alphabet is dated to 1035, while a casting made in the 18th century of an old stone inscription points to 984.^[19]

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.^[14] These indirect borrowings can be traced back to orthographic idiosyncrasies in these loanwords, such as the Burmese word "to worship", which is spelt ပူဇော် (pūjo) instead of ပူဇာ (pūjā), as would be expected by the original Pali orthography.^[14]

In the mid-15th century, bilingual Pali-Burmese texts called nissaya (နိဿယ) emerged.^[9] These texts 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.^[9] Over time, these markers became integral to the morphological structure of Burmese and were seen as more obligatory in literary Burmese, and to a lesser extent, colloquial Burmese.^[9]

The transition to Middle Burmese occurred in the 16th century.^[16] The transition to Middle Burmese included phonological changes (e.g. mergers of sound pairs that were distinct in Old Burmese) as well as accompanying changes in the underlying orthography.^[16]

From the 1500s onward, Burmese kingdoms saw substantial gains in the populace's literacy rate, which manifested itself 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, both in terms of genres and works.^[20] During this period, the Burmese alphabet began employing cursive-style circular letters typically used in palm-leaf manuscripts, as opposed to the traditional square block-form letters used in earlier periods.^[20] The orthographic conventions used in written Burmese today can largely be traced back to Middle 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.^[20] A major reason for the uniformity of the Burmese language was the near-universal presence of Buddhist monasteries (called kyaung) in Burmese villages. These kyaung 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 (by contrast, British India more broadly had a male literacy rate of 8.44%).^[21]

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 (now Pathein) and Rangoon (now Yangon) to Tharrawaddy, Toungoo, Prome (now Pyay), and Henzada (now Hinthada), were now Burmese-speaking.^[22][20] 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.^[20][22]

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 been merged.^[23] 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 (e.g., increased tax burdens from the Burmese crown, British rice production incentives, etc.) also accelerated the migration of Burmese speakers from Upper Burma into Lower Burma.^[24] 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.^[13]

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.^[13] 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, was subsequently launched.^[13] 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 lead-up to the independence of Burma in 1948.^[13]

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 of modernizing the Burmese language in order to replace English across all disciplines.^[13] 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 that was accelerated by the Burmese Way to Socialism.^[13] In August 1963, the socialist Union Revolutionary Government established the Literary and Translation Commission (the immediate precursor of the Myanmar Language Commission) to standardize Burmese spelling, diction, composition, and terminology. The latest spelling authority, named the Myanma Salonpaung Thatpon Kyan (မြန်မာ စာလုံးပေါင်း သတ်ပုံ ကျမ်း), was compiled in 1978 by the commission.^[23]

Burmese is a diglossic language with two distinguishable registers (or diglossic varieties):^[25]

1. Literary High (H) form^[26] (မြန်မာစာ mranma ca): the high variety (formal and written), used in literature (formal writing), newspapers, radio broadcasts, and formal speeches
2. Spoken Low (L) form^[26] (မြန်မာစကား mranma ca.ka:): the low variety (informal and spoken), used in daily conversation, television, comics and literature (informal writing)

The literary form of Burmese retains archaic and conservative grammatical structures and modifiers (including affixes and pronouns) no longer used in the colloquial form.^[25] Most verbs and some nouns also have longer forms in literary Burmese.^[18] Literary Burmese, which has not changed significantly since the 13th century, is the register of Burmese taught in schools.^[13][27] Case marking is highly developed and consistently used in literary Burmese, covering markers for subjects, direct objects, indirect objects, the ablative and locative.^[9] Spoken Burmese also uses case markers, but does so less consistently, particularly for subjects and direct object marking.^[9] The equivalent affixes used in Literary and Spoken Burmese are totally unrelated to each other.^[28] Examples of this phenomenon include the following lexical terms:

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 favour of the spoken vernacular form.^[29][30] Some Burmese linguists such as Minn Latt, a Czech academic, proposed moving away from the high form of Burmese altogether.^[31] Although the literary form is heavily used in written and official contexts (literary and scholarly works, radio news broadcasts, and novels), the recent trend has been to accommodate the spoken form in informal written contexts.^[23] Nowadays, television news broadcasts, comics, and commercial publications use the spoken form or a combination of the spoken and simpler, less ornate formal forms.^[25]

Burmese uses also distinct spoken and written forms for question pronouns.^[18] The following examples demonstrate significant differences in the pronouns, verbs, and other markers used between the literary and spoken forms (contrasts in bold):

Burmese has politeness levels and honorifics that take into account the speaker's status and age in relation to the audience. The suffix ပါ (pa) is frequently used after a verb to express politeness.^[32] Moreover, Burmese pronouns relay varying degrees of deference or respect.^[33] Polite speech (e.g., addressing teachers, officials, or elders) employs feudal-era third person pronouns or kinship terms in lieu of first- and second-person pronouns.^[34][35]

Honorific vocabulary is used in Burmese to distinguish Buddhist clergy from the laity (householders), especially when speaking to or about bhikkhus (monks).^[36] Distinct honorific vocabulary (often euphemistic in nature) is also employed to distinguish commoners from royals. The honorific markers -တော် (daw) and -တော်မူ (dawmu) 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:

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.^[17] Burmese loanwords are overwhelmingly in the form of nouns.^[17]

Of the Indo-European languages, Pali, the liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism, had the most profound influence on enriching the Burmese vocabulary. Burmese has readily adopted words of Pali origin; this may be due to phonotactic similarities between the two languages, and the Burmese script's inherent ability to reproduce Pali spellings with complete accuracy.^[37] Pali loanwords are often related to religion, government, arts, and science.^{[37][non-primary source needed]} Burmese loanwords from Pali primarily take four forms:

1. Direct loan: direct import of Pali words with no alteration in orthography
2. 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 (llit. 'nonexistence') atop the last letter in the syllable to suppress the consonant's inherent vowel^[38]
3. Double loan: adoption of two different terms derived from the same Pali word^[37]
4. Hybrid loan (e.g., neologisms or calques): construction of compounds combining native Burmese words with Pali or combine Pali words^[39]

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.^[42] Mon loans are often related to flora, fauna, administration, textiles, foods, boats, crafts, architecture, and music.^[23]

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:

1. Direct loan: adoption of an English word, adapted to the Burmese phonology^[43]
   • "democracy": English democracy → Burmese ဒီမိုကရေစီ
2. Neologism or calque: translation of an English word using native Burmese constituent words^[44]
   • "human rights": English 'human rights' → Burmese လူ့အခွင့်အရေး (လူ့ 'human' + အခွင့်အရေး 'rights')
3. Hybrid loan: construction of compound words by joining native Burmese words to English words^[45]
   • 'to sign': ဆိုင်းထိုး [sʰã́ɪ̃ tʰó] ← ဆိုင်း (English, sign) + ထိုး (native Burmese, 'inscribe').

To a lesser extent, Burmese has also imported words from Sanskrit (religion), Hindi (food, administration, and shipping), and Chinese (games and food).^[23] Burmese has also imported a handful of words from other European languages such as Portuguese.

Here is a sample of loan words found in Burmese:

Since the end of British rule, the Burmese government has attempted to limit usage of Western loans (especially from English) by coining new words (neologisms). For instance, for the word "television", Burmese publications are mandated to use the term ရုပ်မြင်သံကြား (lit. 'see picture, hear sound') in lieu of တယ်လီဗီးရှင်း, a direct English transliteration.^[46] Another example is the word "vehicle", which is officially ယာဉ် [jɪ̃̀] (derived from Pali) but ကား [ká] (from English car) 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 [jùnìbàsətì], from English university, now တက္ကသိုလ် [tɛʔkət̪ò], a Pali-derived neologism recently created by the Burmese government and derived from the Pali spelling of Taxila (တက္ကသီလ Takkasīla), an ancient university town in modern-day Pakistan.^[46]

Some words in Burmese may have many synonyms, each having certain usages, such as formal, literary, colloquial, and poetic. One example is the word "moon", which can be လ la̰ (native Tibeto-Burman), စန္ဒာ/စန်း [sàndà]/[sã́] (derivatives of Pali canda 'moon'), or သော်တာ [t̪ɔ̀ dà] (Sanskrit).^[47]

The consonants of Burmese are as follows:

According to Jenny & San San Hnin Tun (2016:15), contrary to their use of symbols θ and ð, consonants of သ are dental stops (/t̪, d̪/), rather than fricatives (/θ, ð/) or affricates.^[50] These phonemes, alongside /sʰ/, are prone to merger with /t, d, s/.^[51]

An alveolar /ɹ/ can occur as an alternate of /j/ in some loanwords.

The final nasal /ɰ̃/ is the value of the four native final nasals: ⟨မ်⟩ /m/, ⟨န်⟩ /n/, ⟨ဉ်⟩ /ɲ/, ⟨င်⟩ /ŋ/, as well as the retroflex ⟨ဏ⟩ /ɳ/ (used in Pali loans) and nasalisation mark anusvara demonstrated here above ka (က → ကံ) which most often stands in for a homorganic nasal word medially as in တံခါး tankhá 'door', and တံတား tantá 'bridge', or else replaces final -m ⟨မ်⟩ in both Pali and native vocabulary, especially after the OB vowel *u e.g. ငံ ngam 'salty', သုံး thóum ('three; use'), and ဆုံး sóum 'end'. It does not, however, apply to ⟨ည်⟩ which is never realised as a nasal, but rather as an open front vowel [iː] [eː] or [ɛː]. 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 /mòʊɰ̃dáɪɰ̃/ ('storm'), which is pronounced [mõ̀ũndã́ĩ].

The vowels of Burmese are:

The monophthongs /e/, /o/, /ə/, /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ occur only in open syllables (those without a syllable coda); the diphthongs /ei/, /ou/, /ai/ and /au/ occur only in closed syllables (those with a syllable coda). /ə/ only occurs in a minor syllable, and is the only vowel that is permitted in a minor syllable (see below).

The close vowels /i/ and /u/ and the close portions of the diphthongs are somewhat mid-centralized ([ɪ, ʊ]) in closed syllables, i.e. before /ɰ̃/ and /ʔ/. Thus နှစ် /n̥iʔ/ ('two') is phonetically [n̥ɪʔ] and ကြောင် /tɕàũ/ ('cat') is phonetically [tɕàʊ̃].

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 (loudness), duration, and vowel quality. However, some linguists consider Burmese a pitch-register language like Shanghainese.^[52] Spoken Burmese exhibits tone sandhi in the form of a shift from a low to an induced creaky tone, to indicate possession.^[18]

There are four contrastive tones in Burmese. In the following table, the tones are shown marked on the vowel /a/ as an example.

For example, the following words are distinguished from each other only on the basis of tone:

• Low ခါ /kʰà/ "shake"
• High ခါး /kʰá/ "be bitter"
• Creaky ခ /kʰa̰/ "to wait upon; to attend on"
• Checked ခတ် /kʰaʔ/ "to beat; to strike"

In syllables ending with /ɰ̃/, the checked tone is excluded:

• Low ခံ /kʰàɰ̃/ "undergo"
• High ခန်း /kʰáɰ̃/ "dry up (usually a river)"
• Creaky ခန့် /kʰa̰ɰ̃/ "appoint"

In spoken Burmese, some linguists classify two real tones (there are four nominal tones transcribed in written Burmese), "high" (applied to words that terminate with a stop or check, high-rising pitch) and "ordinary" (unchecked and non-glottal words, with falling or lower pitch), with those tones encompassing a variety of pitches.^[54] The "ordinary" tone consists of a range of pitches. Linguist L. F. Taylor concluded that "conversational rhythm and euphonic intonation possess importance" not found in related tonal languages and that "its tonal system is now in an advanced state of decay."^[55][56]

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.^[18] For the former, this does not occur in literary Burmese, which uses ၏ [ḭ] as postpositional marker for possessive case instead of ရဲ့ [jɛ̰]. Examples include the following:

The syllable structure of Burmese is C(G)V((V)C), 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 /ʔ/ and /ɰ̃/. Some representative words are:

A minor syllable has some restrictions:

• It contains /ə/ as its only vowel
• It must be an open syllable (no coda consonant)
• It cannot bear tone
• It has only a simple (C) onset (no glide after the consonant)
• It must not be the final syllable of the word

The Mon language is attributed with the development of frequent sesquisyllabic reduction in Burmese words, a pattern that does not appear in other Burmic languages.^[18] Some examples of words containing minor syllables:

• ခလုတ် /kʰə.loʊʔ/ 'switch, button'
• ပလွေ /pə.lwè/ 'flute'
• သရော် /θə.jɔ̀/ 'mock'
• ကလက် /kə.lɛʔ/ 'be wanton'
• ထမင်းရည် /tʰə.mə.jè/ 'rice-water'

The Burmese alphabet consists of 33 letters and 12 vowels and is written from left to right. It requires no spaces between words, although modern writing usually contains spaces after each clause to enhance readability. Characterized by its circular letters and diacritics, the script is an abugida, with all letters having an inherent vowel အ a. [a̰] or [ə]. The consonants are arranged into six consonant groups (called ဝဂ် vag) based on articulation, like other Brahmi scripts. Tone markings and vowel modifications are written as diacritics placed to the left, right, top, and bottom of letters.^[23]

Orthographic changes subsequent to shifts in phonology (such as the merging of the [-l-] and [-ɹ-] medials) rather than transformations in Burmese grammatical structure and phonology, which by contrast, has remained stable between Old Burmese and modern Burmese.^{[23][clarification needed]} For example, during the Pagan era, the medial [-l-] ္လ was transcribed in writing, which has been replaced by medials [-j-] ျ and [-ɹ-] ြ in modern Burmese (e.g. "school" in old Burmese က္လောင် [klɔŋ] → ကျောင်း [tɕã́ʊ̃] in modern Burmese).^[57] Likewise, written Burmese has preserved all nasalized finals [-n, -m, -ŋ], which have merged to [-ɰ̃] in spoken Burmese. (The exception is [-ɲ], which, in spoken Burmese, can be one of many open vowels [i, e, ɛ].) Similarly, other consonantal finals [-s, -p, -t, -k] have been reduced to [-ʔ]. 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 the wider use of palm leaves and folded paper known as parabaiks (ပုရပိုက်).^[58]

The basic word order of the Burmese language in syntactic construction is subject-object-verb. Pronouns in Burmese vary according to the gender and status of the audience, although pronouns 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.^[59]

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.^[60]

The case markers are:

The roots of Burmese verbs almost always have affixes which convey information like tense, aspect, intention, politeness, mood, etc. Many of these affixes also have formal/literary and colloquial equivalents. In fact, the only time in which no suffix is attached to a verb is in imperative commands.

Burmese does not have adjectives per se. Rather, it has verbs that carry the meaning "to be X", where X is translated equivalently to an English adjective.^[61] These verbs, called property verbs, can modify a noun by means of the suffix တဲ့ tai. [dɛ̰] in colloquial Burmese (literary form: သော sau: [t̪ɔ́]), which is suffixed as follows:

Property verbs may also form a compound with the noun (e.g. လူချော lu hkyau: [lù tɕʰɔ́] 'person' + 'be beautiful') and reduplicated with a verb to form an adverb (e.g. ကောင်ကောင်းသွား kaun kaun thwa: [kàuɰ̃.kàuɰ̃.θwá] meaning "to go well".^[62]

Comparatives are usually ordered: X + ထက်ပို htak pui [tʰɛʔ pò] + adjective, where X is the object being compared to. Superlatives are indicated with the prefix အ a. [ʔə] + adjective + ဆုံး hcum: [zṍʊ̃].

Nouns in Burmese are pluralized by suffixing တွေ twe [dwè] (or [twè] if the word ends in a glottal stop) in colloquial Burmese or များ mya: [mjà] in formal Burmese. The suffix တို့ tou. [to̰], 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.

This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2025) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Burmese uses numerical classifiers (also called measure words) when nouns are counted or quantified. This is similar to neighbouring languages like Thai, Bengali, and Chinese. This approximately equates to 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: [kʰəlé ŋà] (lit. 'child five') is incorrect, since the measure word for people ယောက် yauk [jaʊʔ] is missing; it needs to suffix the numeral.

The standard word order of quantified words is: quantified noun + numeral adjective + classifier, except in round numbers (numbers that end in zero), 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.

The Burmese language makes prominent usage of affixes (called ပစ္စည်း in Burmese), which are words that are 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 [sʰò] conveys the speaker's attitude to the situation questioning the speaker and can be translated as 'didn't you say that...".^[63] Affixes also indicate the mood of the clause. For example, စမ်း [sã́] is a suffix used to indicate the imperative mood. While လုပ်ပါ ('work' + suffix indicating politeness) does not indicate the imperative, လုပ်စမ်းပါ ('work' + suffix indicating imperative mood + suffix indicating politeness) does.

Some affixes modify the word's part of speech. Among the most prominent of these is the prefix အ [ə], 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 [əsʰaʊʔ ú] and formally pronounced [əsʰaʊʔ əõ̀ʊ̃].

Burmese exhibits pronoun avoidance, where pronouns are avoided for politeness, relying instead on kinship terms, titles or other forms of address, This is referred to as "negative politeness" where speakers avoid directly addressing people. Pronouns account for social distinctions linguistically, reflecting gender, relative age, kinship, social status, and intimacy.^[64][65] Burmese kinship terms are commonly substituted as pronouns. For example, an older person may use ဒေါ်လေး dau le:</