Mon–Burmese မွန်မြန်မာအက္ခရာ
Script type	Abugida
Period	7th century – present
Direction	Left-to-right
Languages	Burmese,Sanskrit,Pali,Mon,Shan,Rakhine,Jingpho,S'gaw Karen,Western Pwo Karen,Eastern Pwo Karen,Geba Karen,Kayah,Rumai Palaung,Shwe Palaung,Khamti shan,Aiton,Phake,Pa'O,Tai Laing
Related scripts
Parent systems	Egyptian hieroglyphs Proto-Sinaitic alphabet Phoenician alphabet Aramaic alphabet Brahmi script Tamil-Brahmi Kadamba[1] orPallava script[2] Pyu orOld Mon[2] Mon–Burmese
Child systems	Burmese Mon Sgaw Karen Shan Tai Tham Chakma Ahom Tai Le Khamti
ISO 15924
ISO 15924	Mymr(350), ​Myanmar (Burmese)
Unicode
Unicode alias	Myanmar
Unicode range	U+1000–U+109FMyanmar U+AA60–U+AA7FMyanmar Extended-A U+A9E0–U+A9FFMyanmar Extended-B U+116D0–U+116FFMyanmar Extended-C

This article containsBurmese script. Without properrendering support, you may seequestion marks, boxes, or other symbols instead ofBurmese script.

TheMon–Burmese script (Burmese:မွန်မြန်မာအက္ခရာ,listen^ⓘ;Mon:အက္ခရ်မန်ဗၟာ,listen^ⓘ, also called theMon script andBurmese script) is anabugida that derives from thePallava Grantha script of southern India and later of Southeast Asia. It is the primary writing system forBurmese,Mon,Shan,Rakhine,Jingpho, and severalKaren languages.^[3]

The Mon-Burmese script is distinguished from Khmer-derived scripts (e.g., Khmer and Thai) by its basis on Pali orthography (they traditionally lackSanskrit letters representing the sibilants ⟨ś⟩ and ⟨ṣ⟩ and the vocalic sonorants ⟨ṛ⟩ and ⟨ḷ⟩), the use of avirāma, and the round shape of letters.^[4]

The Old Mon language might have been written in at least two scripts. The Old Mon script ofDvaravati (present-day central Thailand), derived fromGrantha (Pallava), has conjecturally been dated to the 6th to 8th centuries AD.^{[5][footnote 1]} The second Old Mon script was used in what is nowLower Burma (Lower Myanmar), and is believed to have been derived fromKadamba or Grantha. According to mainstream colonial period scholarship, the Dvaravati script was the parent of Burma Mon, which in turn was the parent of the Old Burmese script, and the Old Mon script ofHaripunjaya (present-day northern Thailand).^{[footnote 2]}

However, according to a minority view, the Burma Mon script was derived from the Old Burmese script and has no relation to the Dvaravati Mon script, based on the claim that there is a four century gap between the first appearance of the Burma Mon script and the last appearance of the Dvaravati Mon script.^[6] According to the then prevailing mainstream scholarship, Mon inscriptions from the Dvaravati period appeared in present-day northern Thailand and Laos.^[5] Such a distribution, in tandem with archaeological evidence of Mon presence and inscriptions in lower Burma, suggests a contiguous Mon cultural space in lower Burma and Thailand.^{[citation needed]}

In addition, there are specifically Mon features in Burmese that were carried over from the earliest Mon inscriptions. For instance, the vowel letter ⟨အ⟩ has been used in Mon as a zero-consonant letter to indicate words that begin with a glottal stop. This feature was first attested in Burmese in the 12th century, and after the 15th century, became default practice for writing native words beginning with a glottal stop. In contrast to Burmese, Mon only uses the zero-consonant letter for syllables which cannot be notated by a vowel letter. Although Mon of the Dvaravati inscriptions differ from Mon inscriptions of the early second millennium, orthographical conventions connect it to the Mon of the Dvaravati inscriptions and set it apart from other scripts used in the region.^[7] Given that Burmese is first attested during the Pagan era, the continuity of orthographical conventions in Mon inscriptions, and the differences between thePyu script and the script used to write Mon and Burmese, scholarly consensus attributes the origin of the Burmese script to Mon.^[8]

Written Burmese is first attested in an inscription from 1035 CE, (or 984 CE, according to an 18th century recast inscription).^[9] From then on, the Mon–Burmese script further developed in its two forms, while staying common to both languages, and only a few specific symbols differ between the Mon and Burmese variants of the script.^[10] The calligraphy of modern Mon script follows that of modern Burmese. Burmese calligraphy originally followed a square format but the cursive format took hold in the 17th century when popular writing led to the wider use of palm leaves and folded paper known asparabaiks.^[11] The script has undergone considerable modification to suit the evolving phonology of the Burmese language, but additional letters and diacritics have been added to adapt it to other languages; the Shan and Karen alphabets, for example, require additional tone markers.

The Mon–Burmese script has been borrowed and adapted twice byTai peoples. Around the 14th century, a model of the Mon–Burmese script from northern Thailand was adapted for religious purposes, to correctly writePali in full etymological spelling. This resulted in theTai Tham script, which can also be described as a homogenous group of script variants including the Tham Lao, Tham Lanna, Tham Lü and Tham Khün variants. Around the 15th or 16th centuries, the Mon–Burmese script was borrowed and adapted again to write a Tai language of northern Burma. This adaptation resulted in theShan alphabet,Tai Le script,Ahom script andKhamti script.^[10] This group of scripts has been called the "Lik Tai" scripts or "Lik" scripts, and are used by various Tai peoples innortheastern India, northern Myanmar, southwesternYunnan, and northwesternLaos. According to the scholar Warthon, evidence suggests that the ancestral Lik-Tai script was borrowed from the Mon–Burmese script in the fifteenth century, most probably in the polity ofMong Mao.^[12] However, it is believed that the Ahom people had already adopted their script before migrating to theBrahmaputra Valley in the 13th century.^[13] Furthermore, The scholar Daniels describes a Lik Tai script featured on a 1407Ming dynasty scroll, which shows greater similarity to theAhom script than to theLik Tho Ngok (Tai Le) script.^[14]

• 
  Hariphunchai National Museum,Lamphun, Thailand; Wat Saen Khao Ho Inscription, Mon alphabet and language
• 
  Hariphunchai National Museum, Lamphun, Thailand; Wat Ku Kut Inscription, Mon alphabet and language
• 
  The Phra Pathom Mon inscription
• 
  TheShwezigon Pagoda Bell Inscription
• 
  Mon inscription on a Sima stone from Takaw-Kamain (Bilu Island),Mon State, Burma.
• 
  Myittha inscription, Mon side
• 
  Kaw-Hmu Mon inscription
• 
  Kaw-Hmu Mon inscription

The script has been adapted for use in writing severallanguages in Burma other than Mon and Burmese, most notably in modern timesShan andS'gaw Karen. Early offshoots includeTai Tham script,Chakma script and the Lik-Tai group of scripts, which includes theTai Le andAhom scripts.^[13] It is also used for theliturgical languages ofPali andSanskrit.^[15]

Variants of the Mon-Burmese script include:

• Burmese
• Mon
• Pali andSanskrit
• Shan, includingKhamti,Aiton, andPhake
• Pa'O
• Palaung languages, includingRumai Palaung and Pale
• Karen languages, includingS'gaw Karen,Geba Karen,Western Pwo,Eastern Pwo, andKayah

The Mon–Burmese script contains 33 consonants that are used for bothMon andBurmese and two additional letters used only in Mon.

Vowels are written as diacritics attached to consonants. Each consonant in the Mon-Burmese script includes an inherent vowela, so the letter⟨က⟩, for example, is pronounced ka. Adding a vowel diacritic modifies the vowel sound, so⟨က⟩ plus the diacritic⟨◌ိ⟩, gives the syllable⟨ကိ⟩,ki. The absence of a vowel is marked with avirāma⟨◌်⟩, for example,⟨က်⟩. A word that begins with a vowel sound is written by combining a vowel diacritic with⟨အ⟩, which acts as a null consonant.There are also seven letters used indicate independent vowels; these are primarily used when spelling words of Pali or Sanskrit origin, and in transcription.

The Mon-Burmese script is used to transcribePali, using the letters to represent the sounds of Pali, transcribed here using theInternational Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration.

The Mon-Burmese script is used to transcribeSanskrit, with the addition of two additional consonants to transcribe⟨ၐ⟩ (ś) and⟨ၑ⟩ (ṣ).

The Mon-Burmese script uses some additional characters to transcribe the Sanskrit vocalics r̥ and ḷ, vowel nasalisation, and aspiration.

The Mon–Burmese script was added to theUnicode Standard in September 1999 with the release of version 3.0. Additional characters were added in subsequent releases.

Until 2005, most Burmese-language websites used an image-based, dynamically-generated method to display Burmesecharacters, often inGIF orJPEG. At the end of 2005, theBurmese NLP Research Lab announced a MyanmarOpenType font named Myanmar1. Thisfont contains not onlyUnicode code points andglyphs but also the OpenType Layout (OTL) logic and rules. Their research center is based in Myanmar ICT Park,Yangon. Padauk, which was produced bySIL International, is Unicode-compliant. Initially, it required aGraphite engine, though now OpenType tables for Windows are in the current version of this font. Since the release of the Unicode 5.1 Standard on 4 April 2008, three Unicode 5.1 compliant fonts have been available under public license, including Myanmar3, Padauk and Parabaik.^[16]

Many Burmese font makers have created Burmese fonts including Win Innwa, CE Font, Myazedi,Zawgyi, Ponnya, and Mandalay. It is important to note that these Burmese fonts are not Unicode compliant, because they use unallocated code points (including those for the Latin script) in the Burmese block to manually deal with shaping—that would normally be done by acomplex text layout engine—and they are not yet supported byMicrosoft and other majorsoftware vendors. However, there are few Burmese language websites that have switched to Unicode rendering, with many websites continuing^{[as of?]} to use a pseudo-Unicode font called Zawgyi (which uses codepoints allocated for minority languages and does not efficiently render diacritics, such as the size ofya-yit) or the GIF/JPG display method.

Windows 8 includes a Unicode-compliant Burmese font named "Myanmar Text". Windows 8 also includes a Burmese keyboard layout.^{[citation needed]} Due to the popularity of the font in this OS,Microsoft kept its support inWindows 10 onwards.

The Unicode blockMyanmar is U+1000–U+109F. It was added to the Unicode Standard in September 1999 with the release of version 3.0:

The Unicode blockMyanmar Extended-A is U+AA60–U+AA7F. It was added to the Unicode Standard in October 2009 with the release of version 5.2:

The Unicode blockMyanmar Extended-B is U+A9E0–U+A9FF. It was added to the Unicode Standard in June 2014 with the release of version 7.0:

The Unicode blockMyanmar Extended-C is U+116D0–U+116FF. It was added to the Unicode Standard in September 2024 with the release of version 16.0:

• Burmese alphabet
• Burmese numerals
• Mon alphabet
• Pyu script
• S'gaw Karen alphabet
• Tai Tham script

• Aung-Thwin, Michael (2005).The Mists of Rāmañña: The Legend that was Lower Burma (illustrated ed.). Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.ISBN 978-0-8248-2886-8.
• Bauer, Christian (1991). "Notes on Mon Epigraphy".Journal of the Siam Society.79 (1): 35.
• Lieberman, Victor B. (2003).Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, volume 1, Integration on the Mainland. Cambridge University Press. p. 136.ISBN 978-0-521-80496-7.
• Stadtner, Donald M. (2008). "The Mon of Lower Burma".Journal of the Siam Society.96: 198.
• Sawada, Hideo (2013)."Some Properties of Burmese Script"(PDF). Archived fromthe original(PDF) on 2016-10-20. Retrieved2016-01-23.
• Jenny, Mathias (2015)."Foreign Influence in the Burmese Language"(PDF).

• Mon–Burmese script

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