Myanmar’s official language is Burmese, which the 2008 constitution calls the Myanmar language. It is the mother tongue of the Bamar, about 68% of the population, and in 2019 it had roughly 32.9 million first-language speakers and another 10 million who use it as a second language. Around it sit about a hundred other languages from six families. The biggest are Shan (about 3.2 million speakers in Myanmar, Ethnologue 2019), the Karen languages (about 2.6 million), Tamil (about 1.1 million), brought by migration from India, Rakhine (about 1 million), Kachin or Jingpho (about 900,000), the Chin languages (about 780,000) and Mon (about 750,000). This mix took around a thousand years to form: Pyu and Mon city-states, the rise of Pagan, Burmese spreading into the Mon south, British rule, and the language policies that followed independence in 1948.
Before Burmese: Pyu City-States and Mon Kingdoms on the Irrawaddy
The oldest written languages of the country were not Burmese. From about the 2nd century BCE to the mid-11th century, the dry zone of Upper Myanmar was home to the Pyu city-states. They were built by Tibeto-Burman-speaking settlers in the irrigated plains of the Mu valley, Kyaukse and Minbu, and their walled cities included Halin, Beikthano and Sri Ksetra near modern Pyay, all three now UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The Pyu lay on an overland trade route between China and India, took Buddhism from India and wrote their language in a script derived from Brahmi.
In the south, around the Irrawaddy delta and the coast, the main language was Mon, an Austroasiatic language related to Khmer and not to Burmese at all. Mon polities, traditionally including the kingdom of Thaton, held the lower valley, and until the 12th century Mon was the lingua franca of the whole Irrawaddy basin. The Bamar arrived from the north in the 9th century and settled in the upper Irrawaddy valley. Their language belongs to the Southern Burmish branch of Sino-Tibetan, which makes it a distant relative of Tibetan and Chinese rather than of Thai, Mon or Khmer.
Pagan and the Myazedi Inscription of 1113
The Pagan Kingdom, founded in the 1050s, turned the Bamar into the dominant power in the valley. The traditional date for its conquest of Thaton is 1057, but conquest did not mean that Burmese replaced Mon straight away. Written Mon stayed the prestige language at court, and King Kyansittha (reigned 1084–1112/13) left many of his inscriptions in Mon.
The earliest evidence of the Burmese alphabet is dated to 1035, and Old Burmese is known from the 11th- and 12th-century stone inscriptions of Pagan. The most important of them is the Myazedi inscription, carved in 1113, which records the same dedication by Prince Yazakumar, Kyansittha’s son, in four languages: Old Burmese, Pali, Old Mon and Pyu. Two near-identical pillars survive. The Swiss Pali scholar Emanuel Forchhammer found them in 1886–1887 near the Myazedi pagoda at Myinkaba, Bagan. Because the Pyu face could be read against the other three, the inscription became the key to deciphering the Pyu language, and it is listed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.
The inscription also shows the languages that fed Burmese. Pali, the scriptural language of Theravada Buddhism, gave Burmese a large stock of loanwords, many of them to do with religion, government, the arts and science, and many early Pali loans came in through Pyu. Mon gave words for plants, animals, boats, textiles, architecture and music. After Kyansittha’s death, Burmese gradually replaced both Mon and Pyu as the common language of the north, and Pyu eventually died out.
From Ava to Konbaung: How Lower Burma Switched from Mon (1500s–1830)
Linguists divide the language’s history into Old Burmese (11th–16th century, Pagan to Ava), Middle Burmese (16th–18th century, Toungoo to early Konbaung) and modern Burmese from the mid-18th century. From the mid-15th century, bilingual Pali-Burmese texts called nissaya shaped the written standard, and from the 1500s rising literacy brought lay scribes into writing law codes and chronicles that monks had once controlled. The script itself changed shape. Early Burmese was carved in square block letters; from the 17th century the rounded letters now typical of the script took over, suited to palm leaves and folded paper parabaiks, which a stylus would tear if it cut straight lines.
Monasteries in almost every village taught boys to read, and this, more than any royal decree, kept Burmese uniform across the Upper Irrawaddy valley. By the mid-18th century male literacy was close to 50%. The 1891 Census of India later found a male literacy rate of 62.5% among Upper Burmans aged 25 and over, against 8.44% for British India as a whole.
The south still spoke Mon. After the fall of Pagan, Mon had become the lingua franca of the Hanthawaddy kingdom (1287–1539), and the lower valley stayed mainly Mon-speaking into the 18th century. The turning point came in 1757, when the Burmese-speaking Konbaung dynasty defeated the Restored Hanthawaddy Kingdom. Displacement, intermarriage and bilingual families changing how they identified themselves did the rest: by 1830 an estimated 90% of the people of Lower Burma called themselves Burmese-speaking Bamar, and Bassein (Pathein), Rangoon (Yangon), Prome (Pyay) and Henzada (Hinthada) had all become Burmese-speaking. Mon survives today mainly in Mon State, Tanintharyi Region and Kayin State, and UNESCO listed it as vulnerable in 2010.
British Burma, 1826–1948: English, Missionary Scripts and the Frontier Areas
Britain took the country in three wars. The First Anglo-Burmese War cost Burma Arakan and Tenasserim in 1826, the second gave Britain Lower Burma in 1852, and the third, in 1885, ended the Konbaung kingdom. Under colonial rule English became the language of power. Burmese was subordinated to English in schools and especially in higher education, where English remained the main language of instruction from the late 19th century until the 1960s.
The British also hardened ethnic lines by classifying people by language in the census. Lowland “Ministerial Burma”, home mostly to the Bamar, Mon and Rakhine, was ruled directly, while the hill “Frontier Areas” of the Kachin, Shan, Chin and Karen were ruled indirectly. The Shan principalities were joined into the Federated Shan States in 1922. Christian missionaries gave several hill peoples their first written standards: the American missionary Jonathan Wade, helped by a Karen named Paulah, created the S’gaw Karen alphabet from the Burmese script in the 1830s, and American Baptist missionaries devised the Latin alphabet still used for Jingpho, the main Kachin language, in the late 19th century. The Lisu, Lahu and Akha of Shan State also write in Roman letters introduced by missionaries in the 20th century. Migration from India under British rule added Tamil, Telugu, Bengali and Nepali.
Burmese nationalism grew partly as a language movement. Rangoon University became independent in 1920, and that December students protested against English in matriculation exams, which led to a short-lived network of “national schools” teaching in Burmese. Pe Maung Tin set up a Burmese language major at the university, modelled on Anglo-Saxon studies at Oxford.
Independence in 1948 and the Burmanisation of Schools
Burma became independent on 4 January 1948, and its first constitution made Burmese the official language. The Burma Translation Society (1947) and Rangoon University’s Department of Translation and Publication (1948) set out to build Burmese vocabulary for every subject that had been taught in English. The same years were politically fragile for the minorities: in the 1947 Panglong Agreement, Aung San had won the support of Shan, Kachin and Chin leaders with promises of autonomy (Karen leaders were not party to it), but he was assassinated that July.
The 1962 coup turned language policy sharply towards Burmese. All schools were nationalised, ethnic schools lost teachers to Burmese-speaking replacements, and many Karen, Kachin and Shan schools failed. In 1964 General Ne Win’s education reforms replaced English with Burmese at university. In August 1963 the government created the Literary and Translation Commission, forerunner of today’s Myanmar Language Commission, which in 1978 issued the spelling authority still in use, the Myanma Salonpaung Thatpon Kyan. The 1974 constitution made the country a unitary state and removed even the modest autonomy minorities had held. In 1989 the military government changed the country’s English name from Burma to Myanmar. Both words come from the Bamar’s name for themselves: Myanmar is the literary form and Bama the spoken one, which is why some minority groups see either name as exclusive.
Shan, Karen, Kachin, Chin and Rakhine: Where Myanmar’s Languages Stand Today
The 2014 census put the population at 51,419,420, including about 1.2 million people who were estimated rather than counted, and the government recognises 135 ethnic groups in eight “major national races”. Burmese is the language of school, government and national media; the formal written register, largely unchanged since the 13th century, is still what children learn to write, while television and comics now use the spoken form. English is taught as the second language in schools. Each large minority language is tied to a state:
- Shan, a Kra-Dai language related to Thai with five tones, is spoken by about 3.2 million people, mostly in Shan State.
- Karen covers some twenty languages shared between 21 Karen and Karenni groups; the main ones are S’gaw, Eastern and Western Pwo, Karenni (Kayah) and Pa’O.
- Rakhine (Arakanese), in Rakhine State, is close to Burmese but keeps the older /r/ sound, which is why the English name Irrawaddy has an r where Burmese now says Ayeyarwady.
- Jingpho is the main language of Kachin State, written in Latin letters.
- Chin is a Burmese label for 53 named groups in Chin State, whose languages are often named after towns such as Hakha, Falam and Tedim.
Smaller communities fill in the rest of the map: Wa and Palaung in Shan State, Moken (Saloun), the country’s only native Austronesian language, the Yunnanese Mandarin of the Kokang in the north-east, and Indo-Aryan languages, including Rohingya, near the border of Rakhine State with Bangladesh. Faith often runs along the same lines as language, since many Karen, Kachin and Chin became Christian under missionary influence while the lowland Bamar majority is overwhelmingly Theravada Buddhist; our guide to religion in Myanmar follows that thread. To see how the language map lines up with the country’s administrative units, read how many states Myanmar has, and for the temples where the Myazedi pillars still stand, see the guide to Bagan’s World Heritage site.