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Burmese language

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The Burmese language is the official language of Myanmar. Although the government officially recognises the language as Myanmar, most continue to refer to the language as Burmese. It is the mother tongue of the Bamar, Rakhine, and other related sub-ethnic groups of the Bamar. Burmese is a member of the Tibeto-Burman languages, which is a subfamily of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. It is spoken by 32 million as a first language, and as a second language by minorities in Myanmar. Burmese is a tonal and analytic language. The language utilises the Burmese script, which derives from the Mon script and ultimately from the Brāhmī script.

Contents

Names of the language

Burmese has two words for "language": စာ ca [sà] refers to written language, and စကား ca.ka: [zəgá] refers to spoken language. There are therefore two names for Burmese: MyanmaSa.png mranma ca means "written Burmese", while 60px mranma ca.ka: means "spoken Burmese". The မ္ရန္‌မာ mranma portion of these names may be pronounced [mjàNmà] or, more colloquially, [bəmà]. The Burmese saying "the pronunciation is merely the sound, whilst the orthography is correct" (ဖတ္‌တော့အသံ၊ရေးတော့အမ္ဟန္‌။) reflects the differences between spoken and written Burmese, as spelling is often not an accurate reflection of pronunciation.

Dialects and accents

This article or section uses Burmese characters which may be rendered incorrectly. A [Burmese Unicode font] is needed, and a modern browser supporting Graphite may also be required to properly view this article or section as intended.
The standard dialect of Burmese comes from Yangon, because of its media influence, but there are several distinctive dialects in Upper Myanmar and Lower Myanmar. Dialects include Merguese, Yaw, Palaw, Beik (Myeik), and Dawei (Tavoy). The most noticeable feature of the Mandalay dialect is its use of the pronoun က္ယနော္ (kya. nau [tʃənɔ̀]) for both males and females, whereas in Yangon, က္ယမ (kya. ma. [tʃəma̰]) refers to females. The Rakhine dialect (Arakanese) is most reminiscent of archaic Burmese, especially in its usage of the [r] sound, which has become a [j] sound in standard Burmese. Dialects in Tanintharyi Division (such as Beik) often reduce the intensity of the glottal stop. However, there is mutual intelligibility between dialects.

Burmese is classified into two categories. One is formal, which is used in literary works, official publications, radio broadcasts, and formal speeches. The other is colloquial, which is used in daily conversation. There are various branches of the colloquial form as well. One form is used when speaking to elders and teachers. Different pronouns referring to oneself (such as the usage of က္ယနော္ or က္ယမ) are used. When speaking to a person of the same status or of younger age, ငာ (nga [ŋà]) is used. When speaking to a monk, a person must refer to the monk as poun-poun and to himself as ဒဂာ (da. ga [dəgà]). Burmese monks may speak to fellow monks using Pāli, and it is expected of faithful Burmese Buddhists to have a basic knowledge of Pāli.

Diglossia

Diglossia occurs to a large extent in Burmese. The discrepancy is quite large, and many linguists consider formal Burmese to be a separate language from colloquial Burmese. The written and prestige form of Burmese has undergone only a few changes and tends not to accommodate the colloquial phonology of standard Burmese today. In addition, different particles (to modify nouns and verbs) are used in the prestige form than in the spoken form. Literate Burmese speakers are able to interpret Burmese despite transcriptions that date many centuries because of intuition and innate pronunciation rules. For example, ၌ (hnai.), which serves as a postposition after nouns is only used in formal Burmese, and is မ္ဟာ (hma) in colloquial Burmese.

Despite the large differences, Burmese speakers rarely distinguish formal and colloquial Burmese as separate languages, but rather as two parts of the same language.

Many have contended that a newer system of orthography for Burmese be created (one based on phonology), to accommodate such differences. In addition, some Burmese linguists have proposed to shift away from formal Burmese, as seen in the gradual changes in form on television broadcasts. However, formal Burmese remains well-established in Burmese. Another obstacle in reforming Burmese orthography are conservative Burmese dialects (that retain older pronunciations more similar to formal Burmese), which primarily come from coastal areas.

Romanisation and transcription

There is no official romanisation system for Burmese. There have been attempts to make one, but none have been successful. Replicating Burmese sounds in the Latin script is complicated. There is a Pāli-based transcription system in existence, which was devised by the Myanma Language Commission (MLC). However, it only transcribes sounds in formal Burmese and is based on the orthography rather than the phonology. Several colloquial transcription systems have been proposed, but none is overwhelmingly preferred over others.

Transcription of Burmese is not standardised, as seen in the varying English transcriptions of Burmese place names.

Script

The Burmese script derives from an ancient version of the Mon script (a Brāhmī script), which was prevalent in Lower Burma prior to Bamar migration to the Ayeyarwady valley region. Notable features of the Burmese script are:

  1. It is syllabic, with letters having an inherent vowel အ (a. [a̰] or [ə]).
  2. The rounded script came from the usage of palm leaves as primary writing material during ancient times (a straight line cut into the leaf would have caused the leaf to split).
  3. Its tones are indicated by various diacritics and special letters added to the initial consonant.

Phonology

The transcriptions in this section use the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Consonants

The consonants of Burmese are as follows:

Bilabial Dental Alveolar Postalveolar
and palatal 		Velar and
labiovelar 		Glottal Placeless
Stops and affricates pʰ p b tʰ t d tʃʰ tʃ dʒ kʰ k g ʔ  
Nasals m̥ m n̥ n ɲ̥ ɲ ŋ̊ ŋ   N
Fricatives   θ (ð) sʰ s z ʃ   h  
Approximants   (r) j (ʍ) w  
Lateral approximants   l̥ l  
The approximant /r/ is rare, and is only used in place names that have preserved Sanskrit or Pali pronunciations (e.g. Amarapura), and in English-derived words. Likewise, /ʍ/ is rare, having disappeared from modern Burmese, except in transcriptions of foreign names. [ð] is uncommon, except as a voiced allophone of /θ/.

The phones /pʰ, p/ are often pronounced as /b/, /kʰ, k/ as /g/, /tʃʰ, tʃ/ as /dʒ/, and /sʰ, s/ as /z/ in compound words.

The placeless nasal /N/ is realized as nasalization of the preceding vowel or as a nasal homorganic to the following consonant; thus /mòuNdáiN/ "storm" is pronounced [mõ̀ũndã́ĩ].

Vowels

The vowels of Burmese are:

Monophthongs Diphthongs
i u ei ou
e o ai au
ə
ɛ ɔ
a
The monophthongs /e/, /o/, /ə/, 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).

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 (loudness), duration, and vowel quality. There are four contrastive tones in Burmese. In the following table the tones are shown marked on the vowel /a/ as an example; the phonetic descriptions are from Wheatley (1987)
Tone name Symbol
(shown on a) 		Description
Low Normal phonation, medium duration, low intensity, low (often slightly rising) pitch
High Sometimes slightly breathy, relatively long, high intensity, high pitch; often with a fall before a pause
Creaky tense or creaky phonation (sometimes with lax glottal stop), medium duration, high intensity, high (often slightly falling) pitch
Checked Centralized vowel quality, final glottal stop, short duration, high pitch (in citation; can vary in context)

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

In syllables ending with /N/, the Checked tone is excluded:

Syllable structure

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 rhyme 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 /N/. Some representative words are: A syllable whose vowel is /ə/ has some restrictions: Some examples of words containing /ə/-syllables:

Grammar

The word order of the Burmese language is subject-object-verb. The only exception to this rule is the verb 'to be', က (kà. [ga̰]), which is placed directly after the subject. Pronouns in Burmese vary according to the gender and status of the audience. Burmese is monosyllabic, that is, every word is a root to which a particle but not another word may be prefixed (Ko, 1924, p viii). Sentence structure determines syntactical relations, and verbs are not conjugated but have particles suffixed to them. For example, the verb 'to eat' is စား (ca: [sà]), and remains the same.

Adjectives

Adjectives may precede a noun (e.g. ေခ္ယာတဲ့လူ hkyau: tai. lu [tʃʰɔ́ dɛ̰ lù] "beautiful" + တဲ့ + "person") or follow a noun (e.g. လူ​ေခ္ယာ lu hkyau: [lù tʃʰɔ́] "person" + "beautiful"). Superlatives are usually indicated with the prefix အ (a. [ʔə]) + adj. + ဆုံး (hcum: [zóuN]). Numeric adjectives follow the noun.

Verbs

The roots of Burmese verbs are almost always suffixed with at least one particle which conveys such information as tense, intention, politeness, mood etc. In fact, the only time in which no particle is attached to a verb is in commands. However Burmese verbs are not conjugated in the same way as most European languages; the root of the Burmese verb always remains unchanged, and does not have to agree with the subject in person, number or gender.

The most commonly used verb particles and their usage are shown below with the verb root စား (ca: [sá]) which means "eat".

The suffix တယ္}} tai [dɛ̀] can be viewed as a particle marking the present tense and/or a factual statement. The suffix ခဲ့}} (hkai. [gɛ̰]) denotes that the action took place in the past. However, this particle is not always necessary to indicate the past tense such that it can convey the same information without it. But to emphasise that the action happened before another event that is also currently being discussed, the particle becomes imperative. Note that the suffix တယ္ (tai [dɛ̀]) in this case denotes a factual statement rather than the present tense. ေန (ne [nè]) is a particle used to denote that the action is in progression, and is equivalent to the English '-ing'. This particle or tense has no equivalence in English. It is used when an action which another person or persons expected to be performed by the subject from is finally being performed. So in the above example, if someone had been expecting you to eat and you have finally started eating, the particle ပ္ရီ (pri [bjì]) is used. This particle is used to indicate the future tense or an action which is yet to be performed. The particle ေတာ့ (tau. [dɔ̰]) is used when the action is about to be performed immediately. Therefore it could be termed as the "immediate future tense particle". The particle မယ္ (mai mɛ̀]) is still imperative in this case.

Nouns

Nouns in Burmese are pluralised by the addition of the suffix ေတ္ဝ (twe [dè] or [tè] if the word ends in a glottal stop). The suffix မ္ယား mya [mjà] (or nè, which means "few") is also used, which by itself means "many". The suffix day, which also pluralises nouns, is only used colloquially and mya is used literally and formally. The plural suffix however is not used when the noun is quantified by being counted.

Numerical classifiers

Burmese, just as in neighbouring languages such as Thai, Bengali, and Chinese, uses nominal classifiers when nouns are being counted or quantified. This approximately equates to English expressions such as "two slices of bread" or "a cup of coffee". In the above example, yauk is the classifier used when referring to people. Classifiers are imperative when counting nouns, so ခလေး၅ (hka.le: nga: [kʰəlé ŋà] literally "children five") is ungrammatical. There are many classifiers in Burmese, and some of the most commonly used ones are shown below.

Burmese MLC transcription Phonetic transcription Usage Remarks
pa: for people Used exclusively for monks and nuns of the Buddhist order
hli: for slices Used in context of food
kaung for animals
hku. general classifier Used with almost all nouns except for animate objects
hkwak For open containers with liquid
lum: for round objects
pra: for flat objects
cang: [zíN] for vehicles
cu. [zṵ] for groups
u: for people Used in formal context and also used for monks and nuns
yauk for people Used in informal context

Pronouns

Subject pronouns begin sentences. In the imperative forms, the subject is omitted. There are certain pronouns used for different audiences. Object pronouns must have a -go attached immediately after the pronoun. Proper nouns are often substituted for pronouns. In addition, nga and nein are rarely used. One's status (wa) determines the pronouns used. The basic pronouns are:

​​​| တပည္‌့​ေတာ္
တပည္‌့​ေတာ္
Burmese MLC transcription Phonetic transcription English Remarks
nga I/me Informal, used with family and friends
nga tui. [ŋà to̰] we Informal
က္ယမ kya. nau
kya. ma. 		[tʃəma̰] I/me Formal, used by males
Formal, used by females
ဒဂာမ da. ga
da. ga ma. 		[dəgàma̰] I/me Formal, used while speaking to a monk or nun (lit. "donor") exclusively
ta. pany. tau
ta. pany. tau ma. 		[dəbɛ̀dɔ̀ma̰] I/me Formal, used while speaking to a monk or nun (lit. "disciple") exclusively
nang [nìN] you Informal
nang tui. you all Informal
mang: you Informal, used among close friends
a hrang you Formal
hkang bya: [kʰìNmjá] you Formal
su he/she Informal
su tui. they Informal
ai: (da) ha it/that Informal, used rudely to refer to animate objects

Reduplication

Reduplication is prevalent in colloquial Burmese, and is used to intensify or weaken adjectives' meanings. For example, ေခ္ယာ (hkyau: [tʃʰɔ́]), which means "beautiful" is reduplicated, the intensity of the adjective's meaning increases.

Vocabulary

The majority of Burmese vocabulary is of Tibeto-Burman stock, but a large percentage of learnt and educated words associated with religion (Buddhism), philosophy, government, and the arts are derived from the ancient Indian language Pāli. Many English words, particularly those relating to modern institutions (e.g. business, government) have become a part of the Burmese language. Nearly all of the used measurements are from English, although a Burmese system does exist. Hindi loan words are found in Burmese, many of which are associated to food or cooking.

Bibliography

External links

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