Burmese

Burmese is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Myanmar, where it is the official language, lingua franca, and the native language of the Bamar, the country's largest ethnic group. The Constitution of Myanmar officially refers to it as the Myanmar language in English, 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. In 2019, Burmese was spoken by 42.9 million people globally, including by 32.9 million speakers as a first language and 10 million as a second language. A 2023 World Bank survey found that 80% of the country's population speaks Burmese. Burmese dialects are also spoken by some of the indigenous tribes in Bangladesh's Chittagong Hill Tracts, China's Yunnan province, and India's northeastern states, as well as by Burmese diaspora.

Burmese is a tonal, pitch-register, and syllable-timed language, largely monosyllabic and agglutinative with a subject–object–verb word order. Burmese is distinguished from other major Southeast Asian languages by its extensive case marking system and rich morphological inventory. It is a member of the Lolo-Burmese grouping of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The Burmese alphabet ultimately descends from a Brahmic script, either the Kadamba or Pallava alphabet.