Spoken and Written Burmese
About a dozen small words change between the styles, and the sentence order stays the same.
How It Works
People speak one style and write another. Conversation, text messages and films use the spoken style. News, books, signs and official letters use the written style. Both styles keep the same word order and the same verbs.
| Meaning | Spoken | Written |
|---|---|---|
| statement ending | တယ် | သည် |
| will | မယ် | မည် |
| of | ရဲ့ | ၏ |
| at, in | မှာ | တွင် |
| this | ဒီ | ဤ |
| today | ဒီနေ့ | ယနေ့ |
Poppy teaches the spoken style first, because it is what you hear and say every day. The written style comes in from Level 4, as a reading skill. A sentence that mixes the two styles sounds wrong to Burmese readers.
Examples (5)
- ဒီနေ့ မိုးရွာတယ်။
It rained today.
Spoken style: ဒီနေ့ for today and တယ် at the end.
- ယနေ့ မိုးရွာသည်။
It rained today.
Written style: ယနေ့ for today and သည် at the end.
- ဒီကားက ဆရာရဲ့ကားပါ။
This car is the teacher's.
Spoken style: ဒီ for this and ရဲ့ for of.
- ဤကားသည် ဆရာ၏ကား ဖြစ်သည်။
This car is the teacher's.
Written style: ဤ for this, ၏ for of and သည် at the end.
- ပွဲတော်ကို နက်ဖြန် ကျင်းပမည်။
The festival will be held tomorrow.
A news-style sentence: နက်ဖြန် and မည် are the written forms.
Common Mistakes
Mixing a written word into a spoken sentence.
ယနေ့ မိုးရွာတယ်။ဒီနေ့ မိုးရွာတယ်။ယနေ့ belongs to the written style and တယ် to the spoken style. Pick one style for the whole sentence.
How It Connects
Related Patterns
- တယ် / သည်Statements in Writing
This pair shows the statement ending in both styles.
Level 4 - ရဲ့ / ၏Possession in Writing
The word for "of" is ရဲ့ in speech and ၏ in writing.
Level 4 - မှာ / တွင်Places and Times in Writing
The word for "at" is မှာ in speech and တွင် in writing.
Level 4 - ဤ / ထိုThis and That in Writing
ဤ and ထို are the written words for this and that.
Level 4 - မယ် / မည်The Future in Writing
The future ending is မယ် in speech and မည် in writing.
Level 4
Practice Spoken and Written Burmese in Bubblegum
Poppy, your AI tutor, writes Burmese lessons at your level. Tap any grammar point in a lesson to see its full explanation.
