The phonology of Burmese is fairly typical of a Southeast Asian language, involving phonemic tone or register, a contrast between major and minor syllables, and strict limitations on consonant clusters.
Consonants Burmese has 34 consonant phonemes. Stops and affricates make a three-way contrast with voiced, voiceless, and voiceless aspirated. A two-way voicing contrast is also present with nasals and all approximants except for .
+ Consonant phonemesBilabialDentalAlveolarPost-al./PalatalVelarLaryngealNasal voiced voiceless Plosive/Affricate voiced voiceless aspirated Fricative voiced voiceless aspirated Approximant voiced voiceless
Phonetic notes: The voicelessness of sonorants is not always perceptible. , which was * in Pali and OB, but was shifted forward by the shift of *→, is often transliterated as ⟨s⟩ and transcribed in MSB but its actual pronunciation is closer to , a dental flap, often accompanied by aspiration or a slight dental fricative, although it can also be voiced. It has a short release generated by moving the tongue back sharply from an interdental position, and will sound to English speakers like a short dental fricative combined with elements of a tap or stop. is the voiced allophone of and is not itself a phoneme. These are also pronounced as dental , and thus prone to merger with alveolar . is a complex phoneme to define. It is a reflex of the earlier and then consonants. It is still distinguished from , although it is not so much aspirated as pronounced breathy, and imparts a slight breathy quality to the following vowel making a more accurate transcription. Nonetheless, it is prone to merger with . is often realised as , particularly word initially. is rare, having disappeared from modern Burmese, except in transcriptions of foreign names and a handful of native words.
An additional rare occurs, but this only appears in toponyms and personal names that have retained Sanskrit or Pali pronunciations (such as Amarapura, pronounced ) and in English-derived words. Historically, became in Burmese, and is usually replaced by in Pāli loanwords, e.g. ra.hanta ('monk'), raja. ('king'). Occasionally it is replaced with (e.g., ti.rac hcan 'animal'), pronounced or .
Medials and palatalisation
Burmese permits the palatalisation of certain consonants. Besides [u̯], which is often erroneously treated as a medial [w] (see vowels), Burmese only permits the palatal medial. This is derived from Old Burmese * * and *, and is, therefore, reflected in various ways in different dialects. In MSB orthography, two spellings exist for the medial (demonstrated on the consonant ), one reflecting an original ( - ), and one an original ( - ). Official government romanisation still reflects this fact, as Myanmar, in official romanisation is rendered mran-ma.
The letter represents in initial position, but as a medial, it has completely merged with and . In OB inscriptions, this medial could be rendered with a subscript or "stacked" as in , a practice still used in some dialects, such as Tavoyan/Dawei where medial is still pronounced distinctly. Although the palatalisation of the labials is simple → , and the velar nasal predictably palatalises into a palatal nasal → . The palatalisation of leads, ostensibly to ; however, it often causes vowel raising or breaking, and may remain unchanged before . The velar stops palatalise into .
The alveolars and historical palatals cannot be followed by medials except in loan words, but even this is rare. Indeed, the letter *jʰ [z, sʰ] is almost indistinguishable from the s+y sequence and many combinations of alveolar+medial will render poorly in certain font sets which were not designed to handle non-native combined graphs.
The homorganic nasal and glottal stop
Only two consonants can occur word finally in native vocabulary:Word-final consonants in loans are omitted entirely in speech. the homorganic or placeless nasal, and the homorganic or glottal stop. These bear some similarities to the Japanese moraic nasal ん and moraic obstruent sokuon っ.
The glottal stop is the realisation of all four possible final consonants: , , , , and the retroflex found in loan words. It has the effect of shortening the vowel and precluding it from bearing tone. This itself is often referred to as the "checked" or "entering" tone, following Chinese nomenclature. It can be realised as a geminate of a following stop, although this is purely allophonic and optional as the difference between the sequence and is only in the catch, and thus barely audible. The primary indicator of this final is the impact on the vowel.
The final nasal is the value of the four native final nasals: , , , , as well as the retroflex (used in Pali loans) and nasalisation mark anusvara demonstrated here above ka (က → ကံ) which most often stands in for a homorganic nasal word medially as in တံခါး tankhá ('door', and တံတား tantá ('bridge') or else replaces final -m in both Pali and native vocabulary, especially after the OB vowel *u e.g. ငံ ngam ('salty'), သုံး thóum ('three; use'), and ဆုံး sóum ('end'). It does not, however, apply to which is never realised as a nasal, but rather as an open front vowel or . The final nasal is usually realised as nasalisation of the vowel. It may also allophonically appear as a homorganic nasal before stops. For example, in ('storm'), which is pronounced .
Series of stops Burmese orthography follows similar conventions to that of other Brahmic scripts and can perfectly transcribe words from Pali, an Indic language. As a result, the Burmese script uses far more symbols than Burmese needs for its phonemic inventory.
Besides the set of retroflex consonants , , , , , and , which are pronounced as alveolar in Burmese, all stops come in sets of four: voiceless aspirated, voiceless, voiced, and voiced aspirated or murmured. The first set , , , and , as well as the second set , , , and are commonly used in Burmese. The voiced set , , , and are used in Burmese, but sparingly. They are frequently seen in loans from Pali. It may be possible to say that they exist only in loans; however, some of the words they appear in are so old and deeply integrated into the language that the three-way voicing/aspiration distinction can still be said to be an important part of the language.
The final set , , , and is exceedingly rare. They are generally pronounced as voiced or, when following a syllable final stop, aspirated . The most common by far is used in the negative indicative verb particle ဘူး bhú or , and also in some common loans. Indeed, can be said to be the "default" spelling of in Burmese for loans while is restricted to older loans.
Burmese voicing sandhi
Burmese exhibits consonant mutation in the form of voicing sandhi. Speakers from Yangon and Upper Myanmar exhibit more consistent use of voicing sandhi and assimilation than speakers from peripheral regions, though local and individual variation exists. In Arakanese (Rakhine), voicing is limited to plain initials, while it is entirely absent in the Intha dialect. Traditionally, voiceless unaspirated stops became voiced stops, which at first, was allophonic. However, due to the influx of phonemic voiced stops from loan words, and owing to the extension of sandhi to voiceless aspirated stops as well – a feature which does not affect more conservative dialects – sandhi has become an important part of Burmese phonology and word building. In brief, the following shifts can occur in MSB: Original consonant1st stage of voicing2nd stage of voicing → —— → → —ŋ̊—n̥—m̥—ɲ̊— Third stages and onwards only affect morphemes and not lexical words, and null is distinct from the glottal stop ( 'him, her' vs. 'his/her pot'). Additionally can become voiced under the same conditions, however this is purely allophonic since the voiced phone does not exist in any other context. Voicing also occurs in the pronunciation of Burmese numerals and classifiers. Some commonly used grammatical markers like ( → → ) and ( → ) also undergo the 2nd stage of voicing.
Sandhi can occur in two environments. In the first environment, consonants become voiced between vowels or after nasals. This is similar to rendaku in Japanese. This therefore, can affect any consonant except the first consonant of the phrase or a consonant preceded by a stop. e.g. 'hot water': ← +
The second environment occurs around reduced syllables (see reduction for more). When a syllable becomes reduced, the vowel and any final consonants are reduced to a short schwa . Reduction cannot occur in the final syllable of a word. When a syllable becomes reduced, if both the consonant preceding and following the schwa – i.e. the consonant of the reduced syllable and the consonant of the following syllable – are stops, then both will be voiced: e.g. 'promise': ← +
In some compound works, the phoneme , when following the nasalized final , can shift to a sound: e.g. 'blouse' ( angkyi) - → .
The phonemes , when following the nasalized final , can become in compound words: e.g. 'to consult' - → e.g. 'to apologize' - → e.g. 'airplane' - →
Aspiration and devoicing
Although Burmese natively contrasts unaspirated and aspirated stops, there is an additional devoicing/aspirating feature. In OB, h- or a syllable beginning with could be prefixed to roots, merging over time with the consonant of the following syllable. In the case of the unaspirated stops, these are replaced with the aspirated letter, however words beginning with use a subscript diacritic called ha-to to indicate devoicing: , although as noted above, is incredibly rare. Devoicing in Burmese is not strong, particularly not on nasals. The sequence is pronounced closer to than and is more noticeable in its tone raising effects.
In many Burmese verbs, pre-aspiration and post-aspiration distinguishes the causative and non-causative forms of verbs, where the aspirated initial consonant indicates active voice or a transitive verb, while an unaspirated initial consonant indicates passive voice or an intransitive verb: e.g. 'to cook' , vs. 'to be cooked' , e.g. 'to loosen/answer' , vs. 'to be loosened' , e.g. 'to elevate' , vs. 'to be elevated' ,
Vowels The vowels of Burmese are:
+ Vowel phonemes Front Central Backoralnasaloralnasaloralnasal Close Close-mid Open-mid Open
In addition to the above monophthongs, Burmese also has nasal and oral diphthongs: . There is debate on the phonemicity of some of the above vowels. For example, argues that is an allophone of in closed syllables (those with a syllable coda) and is a reduced allophone of other vowels. The monophthongs , , , and occur only in open syllables (those without a syllable coda); the diphthongs , and occur only in closed syllables. only occurs in a minor syllable, and is the only vowel that is permitted in a minor syllable (see below).
The close vowels and and the close portions of the diphthongs are somewhat mid-centralized () in closed syllables, i.e. before and . Thus ('two') is phonetically and ('cat') is phonetically .
Although this analysis is (more or less) correct from a purely phonetic point of view, it hides the diachronic nature of Burmese vowel development and mergers, and obfuscates the reasoning behind Burmese orthography.
Vowels in open syllables
Synchronically, there can be said to be a total of ten vowels in Modern Standard Burmese (MSB) open syllables: . Although the vowels , , and are commonly treated as medial-vowel sequences, reducing the vowel inventory of MSB in open syllables from ten to seven, the behaviour of , , and is unlike that of glide-vowel combinations (See the section on glides below for a more complete explanation).