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Myanmar–English Dictionary (Burmese: မြန်မာ-အင်္ဂလိပ်အဘိဓာန်) is a modern Government project in Myanmar (formerly Burma), first published in 1993 by the Government of Myanmar's Myanmar Language Commission.
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]
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.
Burmese names (Burmese: မြန်မာ အမည်) lack the serial structure of most Western names. Like other Mainland Southeast Asian people (excepted Vietnamese ), the people of Myanmar have no customary matronymic or patronymic naming system and no tradition of surnames .
The greeting mingalaba is a relatively modern creation. The phrase first emerged during British rule in Burma in the 19th to 20th centuries, coined as a Burmese language equivalent to 'hello' or 'how are you.' [4] In the late 1960s, [5] the Burmese government institutionalized the phrase in the country's educational system.
The word Chin (MLCTS: khyang:) is a pseudo-exonym, meaning it is a Burmese adaption of the Asho Chin word khlong or khlaung, which means "man" or "person." It is hypothesized that the Burmese called the Asho Chin, or Asho khlong, by the latter portion of their name when they first saw them.
Burmese is an agglutinative language. It has a subject-object-verb word order and is head-final . Particles are heavily utilized to convey syntactic functions, with wide divergence between literary and colloquial forms.
Myanmar is known by a name deriving from Burma as opposed to Myanmar in Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Greek – Birmania being the local version of Burma in both Italian and Spanish, Birmânia in Portuguese, and Birmanie in French. [32] As in the past, French-language media today consistently use Birmanie. [33] [34]