Eastern Pwo or Phlou (, ) is a Karen language spoken by Eastern Pwo people and over a million people in Myanmar and by about 50,000 in Thailand, where it has been called Southern Pwo. It is not intelligible with other varieties of Pwo, with which it shares 63 to 65% lexical similarity. The Eastern Pwo dialects share 91 to 97% lexical similarity.
A script called Leke was developed between 1830 and 1860 and is used by members of the millenarian Leke sect of Buddhism. Otherwise, a variety of Mon-Burmese alphabets are used, and refugees in Thailand have created a Thai alphabet that is in limited use.
Distribution Kayin State and Tanintharyi Region: long contiguous area near the Thai border Bago Region: Bago and Toungoo townships
Phonology The following displays the phonological features of two of the eastern Pwo Karen dialects, Pa'an and Tavoy:
Consonants
LabialDentalAlveolarPalatalVelarUvular/GlottalNasalPlosive/Affricatevoicelessaspiratedvoicedimplosive()()FricativevoicelessvoicedSonorantmedianlateral
Post-alveolar affricates //, are realized as fricatives [], among some formal dialects. // when pronounced slowly is phonetically realized as a dental affricate []. Voiced plosives // are pronounced as implosives [] only in the Pa'an dialect. // does not exist in the Tavoy dialect. // may tend to be slightly fricativized [] when preceding front vowels. // may also be realized as a tap [].
Vowels FrontCentralBackHighNear-highHigh-midLow-midLow
// does not occur after a // sound. // are merged with // in the Tavoy dialect.
Tones Four tones are present in Eastern Pwo: Tonesv́v̄v̀v̂
Dialects Pa’an (Inland Eastern Pwo Karen, Moulmein) Kawkareik (Eastern Border Pwo Karen) Tavoy (Southern Pwo Karen)
Alphabet The alphabet used for Eastern Pwo Karen language is in Mon-Burmese script.
Letters The Eastern Pwo alphabet contains 36 letters, including 3 unique to the language (in gold), and one shared with Mon.
Numerals Number Numeral Name 0 ပၠဝ်ပၠေ/သြုံ့ 1 လ်ု လုဟ် 2 ၮီ့ 3 သိုင့် 4 လီႋ 5 ယာဲ 6 ၰူ့ 7 နိုဲ့ 8 ၰိုတ် 9 ခုဲ့ 10 လ်ုဆီ့(ဆီ့) 11 ဆီ့လ်ု 12 ဆီ့ၮီ့ 20 ၮီ့ဆီ့ 21 ၮီ့ဆီ့လ်ု 22 ၮီ့ဆီ့ၮီ့ 100 လ်ုဖင်ႋ(ဖင်ႋ) 101 လ်ုဖင်ႋလ်ု 1 000 လ်ုမိုင့်(မိုင့်) 10 000 လ်ုလာ(လာ) 100 000 လ်ုလုဂ်(လုဂ်)/လ်ုသိင်ႋ(သိင်ႋ)
The Eastern Pwo Karen numerals were encoded in the Myanmar Extended C Unicode block in Unicode v16.0 in 2024.
The number zero, ploh plih (ပၠဝ်ပၠေ), means "of no value". The number zero is not used in day-to-day life and mostly exists in writing only. People are taught to use the Burmese numeric system instead, including zero. Chi (ဆီ့) denotes 10, any number from 1 to 9 before chi can be interpreted as "of ten(s)", so 20 would be ne chi. Pong (ဖင်ႋ) denotes 100, any number from 1 to 9 before pong can be interpreted as "hundred(s)", so 200 would be ne pong. Similarly, the same rule applies to thousand, muh (မိုင့်); ten-thousand, lah (လာ); and hundred-thousand, loud/thein (လုဂ်/သိင်ႋ). Numbers after the hundred-thousands (millions and above) are prefixed with thay (သိင်ႋ), hundred thousand. For example, one million would be loud/thein luh chi (လုဂ်/သိင်ႋလ်ုဆီ့), "hundred thousand of tens"; two million would be loud/thay ne chi (လုဂ်/သိင့်ၮီ့ဆီ့), hundred thousand of two tens; ten million would be loud/thay luh pong (လုဂ်/သိင်ႋလ်ုဖင်ႋ), "hundred thousand of hundreds"; one billion would be loud/thay luh lah (လုဂ်/သိင်ႋလ်ုလာ), "hundred thousand of ten thousands".
Decimals Due to the close approximation to Thailand, the Eastern Pwo Karen adopts Thai's decimal word, chut, (Karen: ကျူဒ်, ကျူ(ဒ်); Thai: จุด; English: and, dot). For example, 1.01 is luh chut ploh plih luh (လ်ု ပၠဝ်ပၠေလ်ု).
Fractions Fractions are formed by saying puh (ပုံႉ) after the numerator and the denominator. For example, one-third (1/3) would be luh puh thuh puh (လ်ုပုံသိုင့်ပုံ) and three over one, three-"oneths" (3/1) would be thuh puh luh puh (သိုင့်ပုံလ်ုပုံ).
References