Burmese

Burmese is a Tibeto-Burman language of the Sino-Tibetan family, the native speech of the Bamar people of the upper Irrawaddy valley and the lingua franca of the Burmese kingdoms. It has a heavy load of Pali vocabulary, much of it borrowed through the earlier Pyu speech of the Pagan kingdom.

The Burmese alphabet, a Brahmic abugida ultimately of Kadamba or Pallava origin and adapted from the Mon script, first appears in eleventh-century Pagan inscriptions, the oldest evidence dating to 1035. Old Burmese gave way to Middle Burmese in the sixteenth century, when square letterforms became the rounded script of palm-leaf manuscripts.

Modern Burmese emerged in the mid-eighteenth century, spread through the villages by Buddhist monastery schools, and the Konbaung conquest of the Mon kingdom of Pegu in 1757 carried it into the Irrawaddy delta, which by 1830 had largely shifted from Mon to Burmese.