The Burmese script (Burmese: , MLCTS mranma akkha.ra; ) is an abugida in the Brahmic family used in Burma for writing Burmese. In addition, various other scripts share some aspect and letters of the Burmese script, though they should not be considered strictly Burmese, including Mon, Shan, S'gaw Karen, Eastern and Western Pwo Karen dialects, Geba Karen, Rumai Palaung, Kayah, as well as being used as scripts for Pali and Sanskrit. The characters are rounded in appearance, because the traditional palm leaves used for writing on with a stylus would have been ripped by straight lines. It is written from left to right. It requires no spaces between words although modern writing usually contains spaces after each clause to enhance readability.

The Burmese script, adapted from the Mon script, has undergone considerable modifications to suit the phonology of Burmese, and to fit its word order of Subject Object Verb. This script has been altered from language to language, including Shan and Karen. One major difference is the existence of tone markers in the Shan and Karen scripts which do not exist in the Burmese script. The unicode font designated for Myanmar language includes Shan and Karen as well as modern Mon script support.

The Burmese script may be transliterated into the Latin alphabet with the MLC Transcription System.

Syllable onsets

A syllable onset is the consonant or consonant cluster that appears before the vowel of a syllable. The Burmese script has 33 letters to indicate the initial consonant of a syllable, and four diacritics to indicate additional consonants in the onset. Like other abugidas, including the other members of the Brahmic family, vowels are indicated in Burmese script by diacritics placed above, below or beside the consonant character. A consonant letter with no vowel diacritic has the inherent vowel (often reduced to when another syllable follows in the same word).
The following names are transliterated in contemporary Burmese.

Consonant letters may be modified by one or more diacritics indicating an additional consonant before the vowel. These diacritics are (MLCTS h-, indicating that a sonorant consonant is voiceless), (MLCTS -y-, indicating [j] or palatalization of a velar consonant), (MLCTS -r-, which has the same value as ), and (MLCTS -w-, usually indicating [w]).

Syllable rhymes

Syllable rhymes (i.e. vowels and any consonants that may follow them within the same syllable) are indicated in Burmese by a combination of diacritic marks and consonant letters marked with the virama character (called a.sat in Burmese), which suppresses the inherent vowel of the consonant letter.

Other symbols

One or more of these accents can be added to a consonant to change its sound. In addition, other modifiying symbols are used to differentiate tone and sound, but are not considered diacritics.

Ligatures

Specific consonants (a final and the following consonant), when placed next to one another, may be stacked, with the final placed underneath the consonant. They are considered ligatures, and are typically used to abbreviate, but are not necessary and are primarily used to denote Pali or Sanskrit origin.

Digits

A decimal numbering system is used, and numbers are written in the same order as Hindu-Arabic numerals.

The numerals from zero to nine are: (Unicode 1040 to 1049). The number 1945 would be written as . separators (such as commas) to group digits are not used.

Another set of digits from zero to nine is used in the Shan language.

Punctuation

There are two primary break characters in Burmese, drawn as one or two downward strokes ( or ), which respectively act as a comma and a full stop . is used as a full stop if the sentence immediately ends with a verb. is roughly the equivalent of a comma and is used to connect two trains of thought.

Unicode

The Unicode range for writing Burmese and other languages of Myanmar is U+1000–U+109F. Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points.

For writing the basic Burmese language, only U+1000–U+104F is needed:

The rest of the chart contains extensions for other languages:

The 4 code points U+109A–U+109D are still not assigned.

Websites using Burmese Unicode

Until 2005, most Burmese language websites used an image-based dynamically generated method of displaying characters (often in GIF or JPEG). At the end of 2005, the Burmese NLP Research Lab announced a Myanmar Open Type font named Myanmar1. This font contains not only Unicode code points and glyphs but also the OTLs logic and rules. Their research center is based in Myanmar ICT Park, Yangon. Padauk, which was produced by SIL International, is Unicode compliant, but initially required a Graphite engine (now OpenType tables for Windows are in the current version of this font). After Unicode 5.1 Standard released on April 4, 2008, three Unicode 5.1 compliant Fonts are available under public license.

Many Burmese font makers have created Burmese fonts such as, Win Innwa, CE Font, Myazedi, Zawgyi, Ponnya, Mandalay etc. It is important to note that those Unicode Burmese fonts are not Unicode compliant, because they use unallocated codepoints in the Burmese block to manually deal with shaping that would normally be done by the Uniscribe engine and they are not yet supported by Microsoft and other major software vendors. The Myanmar Bible Society launched a Burmese Unicode website, using Mozilla Firefox & Padauk Open Type ver 2.1 font from ThanLwinSoft, and here Burmese characters are displayed correctly. The Australian Government website followed, using the Padauk OT font ().

Many big websites are still using a GIF/JPG display method.

See also

• Brahmic family

• Burmese language