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What is the official language of Myanmar?

Burmese is the official language of Myanmar and belongs to the Burmese branch of the Tibeto-Burman family of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Mainly distributed in the Ayeyarwady River basin and delta area. It has a population of about 28 million, and is also distributed in small amounts in Thailand, Bangladesh, and the United States.

Yangon dialect is the standard language of modern Burmese. Since Burmese is the official language of Myanmar, this shows that Burmese translation still has a certain proportion in actual work and life.

Distribution area

Burmese use areas: mainly in Myanmar, and a small amount in Thailand, Laos, Bangladesh, Malaysia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, etc. It is spoken by 32 million people as a first language and 10 million as a second language. Rank: 29.

Usage

Burmese is an important language in the Tibeto-Burman family of the Sino-Tibetan language family, with about 25 million speakers. It is the lingua franca of the Socialist Federal Republic of Myanmar. Its written language has a history of more than 900 years from the Burmese “Red Shea Stele” engraved in AD 1058.

Burmese is a phonetic script, which not only has a long history, but also has a very rich historical record. It can be seen from these precious historical materials that during the historical evolution of the Burmese language for nearly a thousand years, many changes have taken place in all aspects, whether it is pronunciation, vocabulary or grammar. Among them, the change of consonant rhyme is an important phenomenon of phonetic change.

Some researches on the consonant rhyme endings in Burmese have been done, and it is found that the changing process and changing rules of consonant rhyme endings in Burmese are very similar to those of Chinese and some ethnic minorities in China. The research on the historical evolution of Burmese language can not only find out the law of the development of Burmese language itself, but also provide valuable reference for studying the development of kinship language.

Historical changes

Ancient Burmese

Ancient Burmese had three tones, but their exact tones in the 12th century are unclear. The Yangonian pronunciation is:

First tone: high flat 53 (in open syllables, indicated by a short vowel, in closed syllables, with a dot below the basic consonant); second tone: low flat 11 (in open syllables, It is represented by long vowel symbols, and in closed syllables, there is no special symbol); the third tone: high flat tone 55 (add a double-dot symbol after the syllable: ); the stop sound in ancient Burmese has evolved into a throat stop sound, becoming the fourth sound tone.

Modern Burmese

Burmese has 26 vowels (including diphthongs), including 7 monophonic, 8 short vowels, 7 nasalized vowels, and 4 diphthongs: ei, ou, ai, au.

Modern Burmese has 4 tones: high flat, high drop, low flat, and short. In spoken language, there is a phenomenon of continuous pronunciation change, mainly in which voiceless sounds become voiced, and various tones become soft. There are many complex consonant initials and consonant finals in ancient Burmese, and later some complex consonants become palatalized; the disappearance of consonant finals causes changes in finals and tonal systems.

Burmese is an isolated language, and the basic words are mostly monosyllabic words, which are composed of a consonant or consonant cluster plus a single or diphthong. Nouns have no changes in gender, number and case; personal pronouns have masculine and feminine, honorary and inferior titles; verbs have no tense, personal and other changes. Quantifiers are similar to Chinese quantifiers. The main ways of word-formation are addition (including prefix, suffix), insertion, overlap, etc. In these ways, parts of speech and meanings can be changed. The basic word order is: subject-object-predicate. Modifiers come before the head word. The various grammatical relations and emotional colors between the components in the sentence are mainly expressed by auxiliary words.

The Burmese script is a phonetic script. There are 33 consonant letters, and vowels are generally replaced by symbols except for zero initials. There are several kinds of vowel symbols, such as adding up, adding down, adding before, and adding after. The earliest and most complete document in the Burmese language is the “Miao Qi Ti” inscription. Burmese is a Brahmi script, and its writing feature is circular.