The Burmese language (Burmese:
မြန်မာဘာသာ; IPA: [mjāNmā bāθā]; MLCTS: myanma bhasa) is the official
language of Burma. Although the government officially recognizes the
language as Myanmar in English, most continue to refer to the
language as Burmese. It is the native language of the Bamar and
other related sub-ethnic groups of the Bamar. It is spoken by 32
million as a first language, and as a second language by ethnic
minorities in Burma. Burmese is a member of the Tibeto-Burman languages, which is a subfamily of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Burmese is a tonal and analytic language. The language uses the Burmese script, derived from the Mon script and ultimately from the Brāhmī script. Literary language and spoken language This article or section uses the Burmese script, which may be rendered incorrectly. A Burmese Unicode font is needed to properly view this article or section as intended. More information is available at Myanmar font display issues. Burmese language, literary and spoken, is called မြန်မာဘာသာ ([mjāNmā bāθā]), with ဘာသာ from Pali bhasa, which means language. The language is classified into two categories. One is formal, used in literary works, official publications, radio broadcasts, and formal speeches. The other is colloquial, used in daily conversation. This is reflected in Burmese words for "language": စာ ca [sā] refers to written, literary language, and စကား ca.ka: [zəgá] refers to spoken language. Burmese therefore can mean either မြန်မာစာ mranma ca (written Burmese), or မြန်မာစကား mranma ca.ka: (spoken Burmese). The မြန်မာ mranma portion of these names may be pronounced [mjāmmā] or, more colloquially, ဗမာ ([bəmā]). Tones Burmese is a tonal language, which means phonemic contrasts can be made on the basis of the tone of a vowel. In Burmese, these contrasts involve not only pitch, but also phonation, intensity (loudness), duration, and vowel quality. There are four contrastive tones in Burmese. In the following table the tones are shown marked on the vowel /a/ as an example; the phonetic descriptions are from Wheatley (1987). Dictionary: You've reached the free online Internet dictionary of the Thai language at thai-language.com. It's a dictionary of over 40475 Thai words and phrases with English definitionsand 13131 audio clips.  http://www.thai-language.com/dict/ Bibles: Read the Thai Bible in parallel with English or other languages Bible in Thai language:  Ethnic Harvest's Parallel Bible features 35 Bibles in 25 languages that can be displayed either individually or two at the same time, in parallel columns. http://www.ethnicharvest.org/parallel/ Thai Bible
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