Family Words in Place of You
You can also call yourself by your family word: an older brother says အစ်ကို for "I" when he talks to his younger brother.
How It Works
ခင်ဗျား and ရှင် mean "you", but in everyday talk Burmese people more often use a family word or a title. Shop staff, drivers and neighbours all speak this way.
| Word | Meaning | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| အစ်ကို | older brother | a man a little older than you |
| အစ်မ | older sister | a woman a little older than you |
| ညီလေး | little brother | a boy or a younger man (said by a man) |
| မောင်လေး | little brother | a boy or a younger man (said by a woman) |
| ညီမလေး | little sister | a girl or a younger woman |
| ဦးလေး | uncle | a man about your parents' age |
| အန်တီ | auntie | a woman about your parents' age |
| ဆရာ / ဆရာမ | teacher | a teacher, doctor or respected person |
The same word works for "I". An older sister talking to her younger sister says အစ်မ လုပ်ပေးမယ် for "I'll do it for you."
When you are not sure, say အစ်ကို or အစ်မ. Both are polite for anyone close to your age.
Examples (5)
- အစ်မ ဘာစားမလဲ။
What would you like to eat, sister?
A waiter calls a woman customer အစ်မ in place of "you".
- ဦးလေး ဘယ်ကိုသွားမလဲ။
Where are you going, uncle?
ဦးလေး stands for "you" when you speak to an older man.
- ညီမလေး ဒီမှာ ထိုင်ပါ။
Sit here, little sister.
ညီမလေး is for a girl or a younger woman.
- အန်တီ၊ ဒါ ဘယ်လောက်လဲ။
Auntie, how much is this?
အန်တီ is a polite way to speak to an older woman at a stall.
- အစ်ကို သွားပြီနော်။
I'm off now, OK?
An older brother calls himself အစ်ကို for "I".
Common Mistakes
Calling an older person by a word for someone younger.
ညီမလေး၊ ဒါ ဘယ်လောက်လဲ။အန်တီ၊ ဒါ ဘယ်လောက်လဲ။Said to an older woman selling at a stall, ညီမလေး sounds rude. Use အန်တီ.
Using ခင်ဗျား with your own parent.
ခင်ဗျား ဘာစားမလဲ။အမေ ဘာစားမလဲ။A son speaking to his mother calls her အမေ. ခင်ဗျား is for strangers and sounds cold in a family.
How It Connects
Learn This First
Family words take the place of the polite words for you, so those come first.
Related Patterns
Learn Next
Patterns that build on this one.
Words in This Pattern
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