Burmese Alphabet & Letters

Burmese, the national language of Myanmar, is written in the Myanmar script, a Brahmic script that the Burmese took over from the Mon and that goes back, like Khmer, Thai and the scripts of India, to ancient Brahmi. The oldest dated text in Burmese is the four-language Myazedi inscription near Bagan, carved in the early 12th century. The letters are almost all circles and parts of circles; the usual explanation is that writing was scratched into palm leaves with a stylus, where long straight lines would split the leaf.

Burmese is read left to right, has no capital and small letters, and puts no spaces between words: မြန်မာစာ (Myanma sa, Burmese writing) is one run of letters, and spaces only separate phrases. The script is an abugida: each consonant already carries a vowel, so က alone is read ka, and other vowels are written as signs around it: ကာ, ကိ, ကု, ကေ.

Burmese is also tonal, and the script spells the tone. The same syllable ka is written ကာ with a low tone, ကား with a high tone (car) and က with a creaky tone; the two dots း and the dot below ့ are the tone marks. A syllable is built in a fixed order: consonant, medial, vowel sign, then the final consonant closed by the asat ် and the tone mark, as in မြန် (fast) or မင်္ဂလာ (blessing).

Burmese consonants: the 33 letters from က to အ

Children in Myanmar learn 33 consonants, called byee (ဗျည်း), chanting each with a nickname that tells similar letters apart: က ကြီး ka-gyi (big ka), ခ ခွေး kha-gway (curved kha), ဂ ငယ် ga-nge (little ga), ဃ ကြီး ga-gyi (big ga). The first 25 sit in five rows of five, as in the grid: က ခ ဂ ဃ င, စ ဆ ဇ ဈ ည, ဋ ဌ ဍ ဎ ဏ, တ ထ ဒ ဓ န, ပ ဖ ဗ ဘ မ. The other eight are ယ ရ လ ဝ သ ဟ ဠ အ.

Modern Burmese has fewer sounds than letters. The fourth letter in each row was once a breathy voiced sound and is now said like the third, so ဒ and ဓ are both da; the ṭ-row ဋ ဌ ဍ ဎ ဏ sounds like the t-row and is kept for words from Pali, the canonical language of Theravada Buddhism. စ is s, ဆ an aspirated hs, and သ a soft th. ရ is pronounced y in standard Burmese, which is why ရန်ကုန် is said Yangon although the British wrote Rangoon; Rakhine speakers still say r.

အ is the consonant that carries a vowel at the start of a syllable: အမေ (mother), အိမ် (house). Two more forms complete the set: ဉ, the small nya, used in words such as ဉာဏ် (wisdom), and ဿ, the great sa, a doubled s in Pali loans such as ပြဿနာ (problem). Watch two look-alikes: ဉ (U+1009) and the vowel ဥ (U+1025) are different characters, as are the letter ဝ wa and the digit ၀ zero.

Burmese vowels, tone marks and stacked letters

The vowel signs sit after the consonant (ာ), above it (ိ ီ ဲ), below it (ု ူ) or before it (ေ). ါ is a taller form of ာ, used after ခ ဂ င ဒ ပ ဝ: ပါ, ဒါ. Combined with the tone marks and the asat they make the vowels of the language, such as ော (aw), ို (o) and ိုး. School charts teach twelve basic vowels, thara (သရ): အ အာ ဣ ဤ ဥ ဦ ဧ အဲ ဩ ဪ အံ အား.

The asat ် (a-that, "killer") removes a consonant's own vowel so it can end the syllable: မြန်, ချစ် (love), တစ် (one). The anusvara ံ gives a final nasal, as in သုံး (three). The medials join a second sound onto the first consonant: ျ (ya-pin) and ြ (ya-yit) add a y, and with the k-row they turn into a ch or j sound, so ကျ is read cha; ွ (wa-hswe) adds a w, and ှ (ha-hto) makes the consonant breathy, as in လှ (pretty) and မှ (from).

The virama ္ is invisible: typed between two consonants, it puts the second one underneath the first, mostly in words from Pali and Sanskrit: ဗုဒ္ဓ (Buddha), မန္တလေး (Mandalay). A special case is the kinzi, a curl above the next letter written as င ် ္, which appears in two of the most common words of all: မင်္ဂလာပါ (hello) and အင်္ဂလိပ် (English).

Burmese numbers, punctuation and the symbols ၏ ၌ ၍ ၎

Burmese has its own digits, ၀ ၁ ၂ ၃ ၄ ၅ ၆ ၇ ၈ ၉, used everywhere alongside 0–9: on prices, calendars, bus routes and number plates. The number words from one to ten are တစ် (tit), နှစ် (hnit), သုံး (thone), လေး (lay), ငါး (nga), ခြောက် (chauk), ခုနစ် (khun-hnit), ရှစ် (shit), ကိုး (ko) and တစ်ဆယ် (ta-se). Watch ၀ (zero) against ဝ (wa) and ၇ (seven) against ရ (ya): they look alike but search and sorting treat them differently.

Burmese punctuation needs only two signs: ၊ (the little section), used like a comma, and ။ (the section), the full stop at the end of every sentence. Question marks and exclamation marks are not part of traditional writing; a question is made by a final word such as လား, as in နေကောင်းလား (how are you?). Quotation marks are borrowed from English: “ ”.

Four single characters stand for whole grammatical words of written Burmese: ၏ (i, "of", and a formal sentence ending), ၌ (hnaik, "in, at"), ၍ (ywe, "and, having") and ၎, which is written with င်း as ၎င်း (lagaung, "the said, it"). They belong to the formal literary style of books, newspapers and official letters. The kyat, Myanmar's currency, has no symbol in Unicode: prices are written with K or Ks, or ကျပ် in Burmese, as in ၅၀၀၀ ကျပ်.

How to type Burmese: keyboard, Myanmar Unicode and Zawgyi

On a phone, add the Burmese keyboard: on iPhone in Settings → General → Keyboard → Keyboards → Add New Keyboard → Burmese; on Android in Gboard → Languages → Add keyboard → Burmese (Myanmar). On Windows, open Settings → Time & language → Language & region → Add a language → Burmese, and switch keyboards with Windows + Space; the Myanmar Text font is built in. On a Mac, add the Burmese input source under System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources.

Type a syllable in the order you say it: consonant, then medials, then vowel signs, then the final and the tone. ေ is the one surprise: it shows before the consonant but is stored after it, so ကေ is typed က then ေ; some keyboards let you press it first and reorder it for you. In Microsoft Word you can type a code and press Alt + X: 1000 gives က, 104B gives ။. In HTML, က is က.

For years most phones in Myanmar used Zawgyi, a non-Unicode encoding that assigns Myanmar code points different meanings. Text typed in Zawgyi looks scrambled in a Unicode font and the other way round, which is why people search for a Zawgyi to Unicode converter. Myanmar officially switched to standard Unicode on 1 October 2019. The Burmese text on this page uses standard Myanmar Unicode from the Myanmar block U+1000–U+109F, so it works in apps with Myanmar Unicode support; "Burmese font" generators that offer fancy styles cannot change the letters themselves.

Where Burmese is spoken

Burmese is spoken by an estimated 37 million people, almost all of them in Myanmar, where it is the official language and the language of school, news and government. Many people of the country's other ethnic groups also speak it as a second language. Across the border in south-eastern Bangladesh, an estimated 350,000 people, among them the Rakhine and Marma communities, speak languages closely related to it. Rakhine (Arakanese) keeps older sounds, such as an r where Yangon says y.

The Myanmar script also writes other languages of the country, with extra letters of its own: see the Shan and Mon collections. Kachin is written in the Latin alphabet and Rohingya in its own Hanifi script. The Burmese script's cousins across Southeast Asia, Thai, Lao and Khmer, all come from the same Brahmi family, and the Myanmar (Burma) collection gathers the 🇲🇲 flag and the emoji people use for the country.