Myanmar English

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Burmese English
Myanmar English
အင်္ဂလိပ်, Myanmar English
Welcome to the Golden Land (8388922530).jpg
A welcome sign in English in Myanmar.
Pronunciationbərˈmiz ˈɪŋ glɪʃ
Native to Myanmar
Region Myanmar
Ethnicity Burmese people
Early forms
Latin (English alphabet)
Official status
Official language in
 Myanmar
Language codes
ISO 639-3 –
IETF en-MM
Myanmar.png
Myanmar

Burmese English (also called Myanmar English) is the register of the English language used in Myanmar (Burma), spoken as first or second language by an estimated 2.4 million people, about 5% of the population (1997). [1] The English language was initially introduced to the country during the British colonial period, spanning from 1824 until independence in 1948. [2]

Contents

History

The British Empire annexed modern-day Myanmar in three stages over a six-decade span (1824–1885). It administered Myanmar as a province of British India until 1937, and as a separate colony until 1948. During the British colonial period, English was the medium of instruction in higher education, although it did not replace Burmese as the vernacular. English was the medium of instruction in universities and two types of secondary schools: English schools and Anglo-Vernacular schools (where English was taught as a second language). Burmese English resembles Indian English to a degree because of historical ties to India during British colonization.

On 1 June 1950, a new education policy was implemented to replace English as the medium of instruction in all state schools, although universities, which continued to use English as the medium of instruction, were unaffected. English was taught as a second language from the Fifth Standard. [3] Until 1965, English was the language of instruction at Burmese universities.

In 1965, Burmese replaced English as the medium of instruction at the university level, with the passing of the New University Education Law the previous year. [4] English language education was reintroduced in 1982. Currently, English is taught from Standard 0 (kindergarten), as a second language. Since 1991, in the 9th and 10th Standards, English and Burmese have both been used as the medium of instruction, particularly in science and math subjects, which use English-language textbooks. [3] Because of this, many Burmese are better able to communicate in written English than in spoken English, due to the emphasis placed on writing and reading.

Characteristics

Orthography

The preferred system of spelling is based on that of the British, although American English spellings have become increasingly popular. Because Adoniram Judson, an American, created the first Burmese-English dictionary, many American English spellings are common (e.g. color, check, encyclopedia). [5] The ⟨-ize⟩ spelling is more commonly used than the ⟨-ise⟩ spelling.

Vocabulary

Burmese English is often characterised by its unaspirated consonants, similar to Indian English. It also borrows words from standard English and uses them in a slightly different context. For instance, "pavement" (British English) or "sidewalk" (US English) is commonly called "platform" in Burmese English. "Stage show" is also preferred over "concert."

For units of measurement Burmese English use both those of the Imperial System and those of the International System of Units interchangeably, but the values correspond to the SI system. Burmese English continues to use Indian numerical units such as lakh and crore.

The Burmese language, especially the colloquial form, has borrowed daily vocabulary from English, especially as portmanteaus with native Burmese vocabulary. For instance, the Burmese word for 'ball' is bawlon (ဘော လုံး, lit. 'round ball'), while the Burmese word for bus is bat-sa-ka (ဘတ်စ ကား, lit. 'bus car').

Honorifics

Burmese names represented in English often include various honorifics, most commonly "U", "Daw", and "Sayadaw". For older Burmese who only have one or two syllables in their names these honorifics may be an integral part of the name.

Pronunciation

In Burmese English, the k, p, and t consonants are unaspirated (pronounced /k/,/p/,/t/), as a general rule, as in Indian English. The following are commonly seen pronunciation differences between Standard English and Burmese English: [6] [7]

Standard EnglishBurmese EnglishRemarks
/ɜːr/ (e.g. further, Burma)/á/Pronounced with a high tone (drawn-out vowel), as in Burmese
Word-final /aʊ/ (e.g. now, brow)/áuɴ/Pronounced with a nasal final instead of an open vowel
Word-final /aɪ/ (e.g. pie, lie)/aiɴ/Pronounced with a nasal final instead of an open vowel
/tjuː/ (e.g. tuba)/tɕu/e.g. "tuition," commonly pronounced [tɕùʃìɴ]
/sk/ (e.g. ski)/sək-/Pronounced as 2 syllables
/st/ (e.g. star)/sət-/Pronounced as 2 syllables
/pl/ (e.g. plug)/pəl/Pronounced as 2 syllables
/sp/ (e.g. spoon)/səp/Pronounced as 2 syllables
/v/ (e.g. vine)/b/
/ŋk/ (e.g. think)/ḭɴ/Pronounced with a short, creaky tone (short vowel)
/ŋ/ (e.g. thing)/iɴ/Pronounced as a nasal final
consonantal finals (.e.g. stop)/-ʔ/Pronounced as a glottal stop (as in written Burmese, where consonantal finals are pronounced as a stop)

In addition, many words retain British pronunciation, such as vitamin /ˈvɪtəmɪn/ . Burmese English is non-rhotic.

Related Research Articles

In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution with their unaspirated counterparts, but in some other languages, notably most South Asian languages and East Asian languages, the difference is contrastive.

The English words Daoism and Taoism are alternative spellings for the same-named Chinese philosophy and religion. The root for Daoism or Taoism is the Chinese word 道, which was transcribed tao or tau in the earliest systems for the romanization of Chinese and dao or dau in 20th century systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">International Phonetic Alphabet</span> System of phonetic notation

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation for the sounds of speech. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators.

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with phoneme. Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific.

The Thai script is the abugida used to write Thai, Southern Thai and many other languages spoken in Thailand. The Thai script itself has 44 consonant symbols, 16 vowel symbols that combine into at least 32 vowel forms, four tone diacritics, and other diacritics.

Spelling is a set of conventions for written language regarding how graphemes should correspond to the sounds of spoken language. Spelling is one of the elements of orthography, and highly standardized spelling is a prescriptive element.

Indian English (IE) is a group of English dialects spoken in the Republic of India and among the Indian diaspora. English is used by the Government of India for communication, and is enshrined in the Constitution of India. English is also an official language in seven states and seven union territories of India, and the additional official language in seven other states and one union territory. Furthermore, English is the sole official language of the Judiciary of India, unless the state governor or legislature mandates the use of a regional language, or if the President of India has given approval for the use of regional languages in courts.

Devanagari is an Indic script used for many Indo-Aryan languages of North India and Nepal, including Hindi, Marathi and Nepali, which was the script used to write Classical Sanskrit. There are several somewhat similar methods of transliteration from Devanagari to the Roman script, including the influential and lossless IAST notation. Romanised Devanagari is also called Romanagari.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adoniram Judson</span> American missionary (1788–1850)

Adoniram Judson was an American Congregationalist and later Particular Baptist missionary, who worked in Burma for almost forty years. At the age of 25, Judson was sent from North America to preach in Burma. His mission and work with Luther Rice led to the formation of the first Baptist association in America to support missionaries.

A phonemic orthography is an orthography in which the graphemes correspond consistently to the language's phonemes. Natural languages rarely have perfectly phonemic orthographies; a high degree of grapheme–phoneme correspondence can be expected in orthographies based on alphabetic writing systems, but they differ in how complete this correspondence is. English orthography, for example, is alphabetic but highly nonphonemic; it was once mostly phonemic during the Middle English stage, when the modern spellings originated, but spoken English changed rapidly while the orthography was much more stable, resulting in the modern nonphonemic situation. On the contrary the Albanian, Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian/Montenegrin, Romanian, Italian, Turkish, Spanish, Finnish, Czech, Latvian, Lithuanian, Esperanto, Korean, Swahili and Georgian orthographic systems come much closer to being consistent phonemic representations.

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The University of Yangon, located in Kamayut, Yangon, is the oldest university in Myanmar's modern education system and the best known university in Myanmar. The university offers mainly undergraduate and postgraduate degrees programs in liberal arts, sciences and law. Full-time bachelor's degrees were not offered at the university's main campus after the student protests of 1996. The bachelor's degree was re-offered from 2014 on. Today degrees in Political Science are offered to undergraduate students, as well as postgraduate diplomas in areas such as social work and geology.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rakhine language</span> Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Myanmar

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References

  1. ↑ Bolton, Kingsley (2008). "English in Asia, Asian Englishes, and the issue of proficiency". English Today. 24 (2). Cambridge University Press: 3–12. doi:10.1017/s026607840800014x. ISSN   0266-0784. S2CID   27734149.
  2. ↑ "Language Choice in Higher Education: Challenges and Opportunities" (PDF). British Academy. 14 February 2015.
  3. 1 2 Thein Lwin (2000). Education in Burma (1945-2000) (PDF) (Report). Migrant Learning Centre. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-04-30. Retrieved 2010-08-21.
  4. ↑ Thein, Myat (2004). Economic development of Myanmar. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. pp. 115–118. ISBN   978-981-230-211-3.
  5. ↑ Judson, Adoniram; Stevenson, Robert Charles (1921). The Judson Burmese-English dictionary. Yangon: American Baptist Mission Press. OL   6459075M.
  6. ↑ Barron, Sandy; John Okell; Saw Myat Yin; Kenneth VanBik; Arthur Swain; Emma Larkin; Anna J. Allott; Kirsten Ewers (2007). Refugees From Burma: Their Backgrounds and Refugee Experiences (PDF) (Report). Center for Applied Linguistics. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-04-27. Retrieved 2010-08-20.
  7. ↑ Than Than Win (2003). "Burmese English Accent" (PDF). Papers from the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics. Arizona State University, Program for Southeast Asian Studies: 225–241.
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