Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
LANGUAGE
AroundahundreddifferentlanguagesarespokeninMyanmar.Farandawaythemost
widely used is Burmese, or “Myanmar Language” (
myanma bhasa
) as it's officially
called, the native language of the country's Bamar majority as well as many other
ethnicgroupsincludingtheMon.Burmeseisspokenbyaroundtwo-thirdsofthepopu-
lation (32 million) as their first language and a further ten million as their second lan-
guage.AswellasBurmeseproper,therearealsoseveralmajorregionaldialectsspoken
in different parts of the country such as Intha, Danu, Yaw and Taungyo, not to men-
tion Arakanese, spoken in Rakhine State, which is sometimes considered a dialect, and
sometimes as a separate language. English is taught in schools and quite widely spoken
in larger towns and cities, less so out in the countryside.
Part of the Tibeto-Burman group of tongues, Burmese is a tricky language for Westerners,
although locals will appreciate any effort you make to speak it. The major difficulty derives
from its
tonal
system. Most words are monosyllabic, but word order and many other basic
linguistic features of the language are also quite different to English.
There aren't many
study resources
available for learning Burmese. The best is
Burmese
By Ear
by John Okell of the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies,
comprisingaseriesofaudiorecordingsplusaccompanyingbookinPDFformat,allofwhich
can be downloaded for free at
www.soas.ac.uk/bbe
. The audio files can be loaded onto a
tablet or MP3 player and make for educational listening during long bus journeys and such-
like. Lonely Planet's pocket-sized
Burmese Phrasebook
is also a useful travelling compan-
ion.
THE BURMESE ALPHABET
The Burmese alphabet's distinctively rounded appearance (“bubble writing”, as some
people describe it) derives from the fact that palm leaves inscribed with a stylus were his-
toricallyusedasthemainmaterialforwritingupon,ratherthanpaperandink,withcircular
characters preferred given that numerous straight lines would have torn the leaves being
used.
Like many other Southeast and South Asian languages, Burmese is written in a
conson-
ant
-basedscript-
vowels
and
tones
aresignifiedbyaddingadditionalaccentsandsymbols
to the basic consonant, rather than written separately, as in Western languages. There are
33 basic Burmese
consonants
, with distinctions made between
unaspirated and aspirated
consonants. The script is written from left to right with no spaces between words, although
modern written Burmese usually inserts spaces after each clause to enhance readability.
