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In 2007, Burmese was spoken by 33 million people as a first language. [5] Burmese is spoken as a second language by another 10 million people, particularly ethnic minorities in Burma and those in neighbouring countries. [6] Burmese is a Sino-Tibetan language belonging to the Southern Burmish branch of the Tibeto-Burman languages.
The Constitution of Myanmar officially refers to it as the Myanmar language in English, [3] though most English speakers continue to refer to the language as Burmese, after Burma—a name with co-official status until 1989 (see Names of Myanmar). Burmese is the most widely-spoken language in the country, where it serves as the lingua franca. [4]
The script has been adapted for use in writing several languages of Burma other than Mon and Burmese, most notably in modern times Shan and S'gaw Karen. Early offshoots include Tai Tham script, Chakma script and the Lik-Tai group of scripts, which includes the Tai Le and Ahom scripts. [13] It is also used for the liturgical languages of Pali ...
The Jingpo writing system is a Latin-based alphabet consisting of 23 letters, and very little use of diacritical marks, originally created by American Baptist missionaries in the late 19th century. Ola Hanson, one of the people who created the alphabet, arrived in Myanmar in 1890, learnt the language and wrote the first Kachin–English dictionary.
Since independence in 1948, Burmese has been used in all official communications. Since the early 1960s, Rohingya scholars have started to realise the need for a writing system suited to their own language. Later in 1975, Rohingya community leaders in Myanmar have chosen to use the Arabic script for modern usage as well.
The Burmese alphabet (Burmese: မြန်မာအက္ခရာ myanma akkha.ya, pronounced [mjəmà ʔɛʔkʰəjà]) is an abugida used for writing Burmese. It is ultimately adapted from a Brahmic script, either the Kadamba or Pallava alphabet of South India. The Burmese alphabet is also used for the liturgical languages of Pali and Sanskrit.
Writing systems are used to record human language, and may be classified according to certain common features.. The usual name of the script is given first; the name of the languages in which the script is written follows (in brackets), particularly in the case where the language name differs from the script name.
The language is primarily written using a Burmese script alphabet devised by Christian missionaries, [2] [3] and many of the materials now available for it on the Internet derive from Christian missionary involvement, although most of the Pa'O are generally reported to be Buddhists (without real statistics, etc.).