WRITING SYSTEM
Typing in Myanmar
Burmese is the only language here written in the Myanmar script, where the character count is not the key count: 34 distinct characters appear across 43 practice words. Burmese is typed on the Myanmar3 layout.
A rounded abugida written without spaces between words, whose recent history is dominated by an encoding problem rather than a linguistic one. For about a decade most Burmese digital text used Zawgyi, a font that occupied Unicode's Myanmar code points and assigned them different meanings — so Zawgyi and Unicode text are mutually unreadable while appearing to be the same encoding. Myanmar declared a national migration to Unicode in 2019.
What typing it involves
- Direction
- left to right
- Key inventory
- 34 distinct characters across 43 practice words
- Composition
- marks stack or join onto the letters they modify
- Input
- typed directly on the keys
- Myanmar keyboard layout
- Myanmar3
- Keyboard guide
- labels every key, for every language here
- The chart reaches
- 25 of the 34 characters its practice words use
The characters you will type most
Counted across every practice word in the language below, most frequent first. These are the keys worth finding without looking.
- ်26
- း19
- မ15
- ေ13
- န11
- ု11
- င10
- ိ10
- ာ9
- ြ8
The longest practice word in this script is မိုးကောင်းကင် in Burmese.
The one language written in Myanmar
Other writing systems
- Odia Distinguished by the curved line running across the top of most letters — an adaptation, like Sinhala's rounded shapes, usually attributed to writing on palm leaves, where a straight horizontal stroke risked tearing along the grain.
- Sinhala Written in rounded letterforms with almost no straight lines at all — the usual explanation being palm-leaf manuscripts, whose grain a straight stroke could split.
- Tamil Among the oldest continuously written languages in the world, with inscriptions going back more than two thousand years.
There is a written guide for this script: Typing Burmese: Zawgyi, Unicode, and a decade of broken text. For ten years most Burmese online text was not Unicode, and looked like it was. What Zawgyi was, why it mattered, and what to type today.
Every script this site teaches, with the languages written in each, is on the languages hub. If your computer does not produce these characters yet, that is a setting rather than a missing keyboard — adding a keyboard layout covers it for Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS. The rest of the written guides cover what is the same whichever script you are in: posture, the home row, and why speed follows accuracy rather than the other way round.