ဦး / ဒေါ် / ကို / မ
Titles Before Names
Burmese names have no family name, so the title goes before the whole name: ဦးအောင်ကျော် (U Aung Kyaw).
How It Works
Titles work a little like "Mr" and "Ms". They show a person's age and the respect you give that person.
| Title | For | Example |
|---|---|---|
| ဦး | an older or senior man | ဦးအောင်ကျော် |
| ဒေါ် | an older or senior woman | ဒေါ်ခင်ခင် |
| ကို | a young man, or a man about your age | ကိုဇော်ဇော် |
| မ | a young woman, or a woman about your age | မနီလာ |
| မောင် | a boy | မောင်အောင်အောင် |
Burmese has no family names, so the whole name stays together after the title.
Two titles are also common words. ကို after a noun marks the object, and မ before a verb makes it negative. In မနီလာ မလာဘူး (Ma Nila isn't coming), the first မ is the title and the second makes the verb negative.
Keep the title when the person is not there: ဦးအောင်ကျော် ပြောတယ် (U Aung Kyaw said so).
Examples (5)
- ဒေါ်ခင်ခင်က ကျွန်မတို့ရဲ့ဆရာမပါ။
Daw Khin Khin is our teacher.
ဒေါ် is the title for an older woman.
- ဦးအောင်ကျော် ရုံးမှာ ရှိလား။
Is U Aung Kyaw at the office?
ဦး is the title for an older man.
- ကိုဇော်ဇော်၊ ဘယ်ကိုသွားမလဲ။
Ko Zaw Zaw, where are you going?
ကို is the title for a young man.
- မနီလာ ဒီနေ့ မလာဘူး။
Ma Nila isn't coming today.
The first မ is a title; the second makes လာ negative.
- ကိုအောင်ကို မေးပါ။
Please ask Ko Aung.
The first ကို is a title; the second marks who you ask.
Common Mistakes
Calling an elderly man, such as a grandfather named Aung Kyaw, by the young man's title.
ကိုအောင်ကျော်ဦးအောင်ကျော်ကို is for young men. An older man takes ဦး.
Using only part of the name after the title.
ဒေါ်ခင်ဒေါ်ခင်ခင်Burmese names have no family name. Say the whole name after the title.
How It Connects
Learn This First
Titles before names follow the same age rule as family words.
Related Patterns
Words in This Pattern
Practice ဦး / ဒေါ် / ကို / မ in Bubblegum
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