Burmic

The Burmic, or Lolo-Burmese, languages are a Sino-Tibetan branch of Myanmar, southern China and the Southeast Asian highlands, built around the Burmish and Yi groups, with Karenic usually attached. The oldest traces are the Bailang songs, tribal verse transcribed in Chinese characters in the first century and preserved through later quotations.

Burmese, the branch's principal literary language, was first committed to writing in the Pagan kingdom, whose earliest surviving alphabet evidence dates to 1035: an Indic script adapted through the Mon and Pyu, used for the Old Burmese stone inscriptions of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Burmese absorbed a large Pali vocabulary with Theravada Buddhism, and mid-fifteenth-century nissaya commentaries recast Pali works in Burmese. Burmese became the language of court and monastery, while Yi and Karenic remained village speech fragmented by mountain valleys.