သလား / သလဲ

Another Way to Ask

Level 3

For the future, use မလား and မလဲ.

How It Works

သလား and သလဲ are question endings built on သ, the question form of the statement ending. Use သလား for yes-or-no questions and သလဲ with a question word.

Plain questionWith သEnglish
နေကောင်းလား။နေကောင်းသလား။Are you well?
ဘာလုပ်နေလဲ။ဘာလုပ်နေသလဲ။What are you doing?
ဘယ်မှာနေလဲ။ဘယ်မှာနေသလဲ။Where do you live?

The two forms mean the same. The သ form sounds a little more careful, so you hear it from teachers and in polite talk with strangers.

Use သလား and သလဲ for what is true now, what usually happens and what already happened: ဘယ်သူ လာခဲ့သလဲ။ (Who came?) For the future, use မလား and မလဲ: မနက်ဖြန် လာမလား။ (Will you come tomorrow?)

Like လား and လဲ, they follow the bare verb, with no တယ် in front. Writing has its own question endings, သလော and သနည်း.

Examples (5)

  1. နေကောင်းသလား။

    Are you well?

    သလား asks a yes-or-no question about now.

  2. ဒီနေ့ ဘာစားချင်သလဲ။

    What do you feel like eating today?

    With ဘာ, the question ends in သလဲ.

  3. မြန်မာစကား ပြောတတ်သလား။

    Can you speak Burmese?

    သလား follows the verb with its helper တတ်.

  4. ဆရာ ဘယ်မှာ နေသလဲခင်ဗျာ။

    Teacher, where do you live?

    A man asks his teacher politely; သလဲ goes with ဘယ်မှာ.

  5. မနေ့က ဘယ်သူ လာခဲ့သလဲ။

    Who came yesterday?

    သလဲ asks about the past with ခဲ့.

Common Mistakes

  • Using သလား for the future.

    မနက်ဖြန် လာသလား။
    မနက်ဖြန် လာမလား။

    A question about the future ends in မလား.

  • Keeping တယ် before the question ending.

    နေကောင်းတယ်သလား။
    နေကောင်းသလား။

    သလား takes the place of တယ်.

How It Connects

Tap a pattern to see what it builds on and what it leads to.

သလား / သလဲLevel 3Another Way to Ask

Learn This First

This is another way to ask both kinds of question, so လား and လဲ come first.

Words in This Pattern

သလားသလဲ