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Language Lineage

Lolo-Burmese

Burmese together with Yi, Lisu, Lahu, Hani and Akha, a well-established subgroup whose Burmese branch took its script from Mon.

c. 1st millennium BCE – presentMyanmar and the mountains of Yunnan and Sichuan, extending into northern Thailand, Laos and Vietnam
On this page
  1. Burmese
  2. The Loloish Languages
  3. In its own words
  4. Where it's spoken
  5. Turning points

01

Burmese

The ancestors of the Burmese came south from Yunnan into the Irrawaddy valley in the 9th century and founded the kingdom of Pagan. There they adopted Theravada Buddhism and the script of their Mon neighbours; the Myazedi inscription of 1113, recorded on the Austroasiatic tree, sets Burmese beside Mon, Pali and Pyu. Written Burmese still spells the old syllable-final -k, -t and -p, but in the modern language these have all merged into a glottal stop.

02

The Loloish Languages

The 'Loloish' languages (Yi, Lisu, Lahu, Hani, Akha and others) are spoken by upland peoples across southwest China and the northern parts of mainland Southeast Asia. The Yi had their own logographic script, used by ritual specialists for centuries. In 1974–1980 a standard syllabary based on it was adopted for the Nuosu variety in Sichuan. Lisu is written in the Fraser alphabet, uppercase Latin letters, some rotated, devised around 1915 by the missionary James O. Fraser and the Karen evangelist Sara Ba Thaw.

A sample

In its own words

Burmese

မင်္ဂလာပါ
mingala
auspiciousness
ba
POL
‘Hello (literally, 'blessings')’
Sources (1)
  • Okell, John. 1994. Burmese: An Introduction to the Spoken Language, Book 1. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Center for Southeast Asian Studies.

On the map

Where it’s spoken

Spoken todayShading marks whole countries, not the regions within them.
  1. Myanmarc. 34 million
  2. Chinac. 9 million
  3. Thailandc. 0.2 million
  4. Laosc. 0.1 million

Figures are rough first-language estimates, rounded, from censuses and Ethnologue. Counts for small or scattered communities are especially uncertain.

Rings along the limb

Turning points

Oldest first.

  1. Writing9th – 12th century CE

    Burmese adopts the Mon script

    The Burmese of Pagan adopt the Mon script and Theravada Buddhism. The Myazedi inscription (1113) records Burmese next to Mon, Pali and Pyu, a link recorded on the Monic branch.

    Sources (1)
    • Thurgood, Graham & Randy J. LaPolla, eds. 2017. The Sino-Tibetan Languages, 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
  2. Sound lawc. 16th – 18th century CEContested

    Final stops merge into a glottal stop

    -k -t -p → -ʔ · final nasals → nasal vowels (spelling unchanged)

    Syllable-final -k, -t and -p all merge into a glottal stop in spoken Burmese, and final nasals reduce to nasalised vowels, while the spelling keeps the old consonants. The timing is debated.

    Compare with other mergers across families →

    Sources (1)
    • Thurgood, Graham & Randy J. LaPolla, eds. 2017. The Sino-Tibetan Languages, 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
  3. Writingc. 1915

    The Fraser alphabet

    James O. Fraser and Sara Ba Thaw devise an alphabet for Lisu from uppercase Latin letters, some upside down. It is now the standard Lisu script and part of Unicode.

    Figures · James O. Fraser (1886–1938)

    Sources (1)
    • Thurgood, Graham & Randy J. LaPolla, eds. 2017. The Sino-Tibetan Languages, 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
  4. Writing1974 – 1980

    The standard Yi syllabary

    Authorities in Sichuan standardise the traditional Yi script as a syllabary of 819 signs for the Nuosu language, used in schools and publishing.

    Sources (1)
    • Thurgood, Graham & Randy J. LaPolla, eds. 2017. The Sino-Tibetan Languages, 2nd ed. London: Routledge.