Why I blog in Burmese (ဗမာဘာသာ)

I got a really interesting email the other day from a gentleman all the way in Scotland! He'd been reading my blog and figured out (thanks to the internet) that the language I use here is Burmese. Anyway, he had a question and a little request. First, he wondered why there aren't any "sister" languages that can easily understand Burmese speakers like how speakers of Spanish and Italian can sort of get each other. So, here's a little 411 on that.

Burmese evolved from this super old language family called Proto-Sino-Tibetan, which existed around 6,000 years ago. Over time, it split into two big branches, namely, Sinitic (which gave us Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.) and Tibeto-Burman (which includes Burmese, Tibetan, and lots of others). But for the latter, after thousands of years going in different directions, all these languages became so different that none of them are really mutually intelligible anymore. Now, Burmese has its own special story. Even though it grew into one of the main languages in what's now Burma (Myanmar), the writing system actually borrowed a lot from Mon and Pali.

Pali is from the Indo-European family. Yup, the same one English, Spanish, and Russian belong to! More specifically, Pali came from Middle Indo-Aryan languages, especially Magadhi Prakrit, which people in ancient northern India spoke. If you know Sanskrit, you'll recognize a bunch of Pali words as they're close cousins. Mon, on the other hand, belongs to the Mon-Khmer group in the Austroasiatic family, the same family as Khmer (Cambodian). But like Burmese and Tibetan, Mon and Khmer can't understand each other anymore. They've just evolved too far apart. All of this shows how unique Burmese is. We've kind of been on our own linguistic island for thousands of years so much so that no other language outside Myanmar is mutually intelligible with Burmese today (except for a few regional dialects here and there).

Back to my Scottish friend, he also encouraged me to blog in English, because sometimes the automatic translations don't really do justice, especially for technical content, which I think is fair enough! The reality is that my blog doesn't get huge traffic, maybe a few dozen visitors a week and I always assumed people reading from places like the U.S. or the U.K. were fellow Burmese living abroad.

For me, blogging in Burmese is my way of giving back to the country where I grew up by sharing what I know with the next generation of Burmese software engineers. Though I now spend most of my time in the UK and the U.S. (which I sorta consider as my main home), Burma will always be tied to so many childhood memories, and being able to contribute, even in a small way, feels like a meaningful connection to my fellas back home. So it honestly made me happy to realize that there are readers out there from different backgrounds curious enough to explore my content. That's amazing. So from now on, I'll try to write in both Burmese and English, so everyone can enjoy and understand what I share here. Thank you so much for being here and spending a little bit of your time with me. Shout out to my fellow engineers!