မ…ဘူးလား

Negative Questions

Level 2

It also makes a gentle offer: ကော်ဖီ မသောက်ဘူးလား။ (Won't you have some coffee?)

How It Works

Take a negative sentence and add လား at the end. Now it asks "isn't it?", "don't you?" or "aren't you?".

StatementQuestion
မသွားဘူး။ I'm not going.မသွားဘူးလား။ Aren't you going?
မကြိုက်ဘူး။ I don't like it.မကြိုက်ဘူးလား။ Don't you like it?
မသိဘူး။ I don't know.မသိဘူးလား။ Don't you know?

Use it when you expected something and are surprised: ဒီနေ့ ကျောင်း မသွားဘူးလား။ (Aren't you going to school today?)

Hosts use it to make an offer sound gentle: ကော်ဖီ မသောက်ဘူးလား။ (Won't you have some coffee?)

Helper words fit before ဘူးလား: မရောက်သေးဘူးလား။ (Isn't she here yet?) မလာတော့ဘူးလား။ (Aren't you coming anymore?)

To answer, repeat the verb so there is no doubt: သွားမယ်။ (Yes, I'm going.) or မသွားဘူး။ (No, I'm not.)

With နော် at the end, the sentence checks agreement: မပူဘူးနော်။ (It isn't hot, is it?)

Examples (5)

  1. ဒီနေ့ ကျောင်း မသွားဘူးလား။

    Aren't you going to school today?

    မ…ဘူးလား shows the speaker expected the opposite.

  2. ကော်ဖီ မသောက်ဘူးလား။

    Won't you have some coffee?

    A negative question makes the offer gentle.

  3. လက်ဖက်သုပ် မကြိုက်ဘူးလား။

    Don't you like tea leaf salad?

    လား turns the negative into a question.

  4. ဘတ်စ်ကား မလာသေးဘူးလား။

    Hasn't the bus come yet?

    သေး sits before ဘူးလား.

  5. ခင်ဗျား မြန်မာလို မပြောတတ်ဘူးလား။

    Can't you speak Burmese?

    တတ် sits before ဘူးလား; ခင်ဗျား shows a man is asking.

Common Mistakes

  • Leaving out မ.

    ကျောင်း သွားဘူးလား။
    ကျောင်း မသွားဘူးလား။

    ဘူး always needs မ before the verb.

How It Connects

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

မ…ဘူးလားLevel 2Negative Questions

Learn This First

A negative question joins the negative wrap and လား, so both come first.

Words in This Pattern

မဘူးလား