cherry blossoms

Burmese

Burmese is spoken by about 30 million people in Myanmar, where it is the principal and official language.

Burmese is a monosyllabic language, and is similar to other Sino-Tibetan languages, spoken in South-Central Asia. Speech is characterised by the use of three musical pitches which denote meaning; context and word order are also important.

Spoken Burmese is very different from the written language. The Burmese alphabet is originally derived from Southern Indian script.

Burmese is a single-byte language written left-to-right.