Myanmar Languages

Burmese (also called Myanmarese) is the language of government, schools and television. Other languages spoken regionally include the numerous indigenous ethnic languages, Chinese and Hindi. English is widely used in business. Records were kept in Burmese, English, Chinese, and languages of the ethnic groups. The letter “r” in ethnic Burmese has coalesced with the letter “y.”

The Burmese script is a development of the Mon alphabet, and is non-roman and Indian in origin. The thirty three alphabetical characters are consonants. These are each modified by 12 or more vowel sounds in the written script. There is considerable variance between the colloquial modern spoken language used on television and the formal literary language used in published books, magazines and newspapers. This has resulted in wide variance of romanization values for modern Burmese.