Burmese is distinguished from other major Southeast Asian languages by its extensive case marking system and rich morphological inventory.

[13] For instance, for the term ဆွမ်း, "food offering [to a monk]", Lower Burmese speakers use [sʰʊ́ɰ̃] instead of [sʰwáɰ̃], which is the pronunciation used in Upper Burma.

[14] More distinctive non-standard varieties of Burmese emerge as one moves farther away from the Irrawaddy River valley toward peripheral areas of the country.

Dialects in Tanintharyi Region, including Palaw, Merguese, and Tavoyan, are especially conservative in comparison to Standard Burmese.

[14] The most pronounced feature of the Arakanese language of Rakhine State is its retention of the [ɹ] sound, which has become [j] in standard Burmese.

The earliest evidence of the Burmese alphabet is dated to 1035, while a casting made in the 18th century of an old stone inscription points to 984.

[16] From the 1500s onward, Burmese kingdoms saw substantial gains in the populace's literacy rate, which manifested itself in greater participation of laymen in scribing and composing legal and historical documents, domains that were traditionally the domain of Buddhist monks, and drove the ensuing proliferation of Burmese literature, both in terms of genres and works.

These kyaung served as the foundation of the pre-colonial monastic education system, which fostered uniformity of the language throughout the Upper Irrawaddy valley, the traditional homeland of Burmese speakers.

Lower Burma's shift from Mon to Burmese was accelerated by the Burmese-speaking Konbaung Dynasty's victory over the Mon-speaking Restored Hanthawaddy Kingdom in 1757.

From the 19th century onward, orthographers created spellers to reform Burmese spelling, because of ambiguities that arose over transcribing sounds that had been merged.

Historically the literary register was preferred for written Burmese on the grounds that "the spoken style lacks gravity, authority, dignity".

[35][36] Honorific vocabulary is used in Burmese to distinguish Buddhist clergy from the laity (householders), especially when speaking to or about bhikkhus (monks).

The honorific markers -တော် (daw) and -တော်မူ (dawmu) are suffixed to nouns and verbs respectively, in relation to Buddhist clergy and royals.

[43] Mon loans are often related to flora, fauna, administration, textiles, foods, boats, crafts, architecture, and music.

[23] As a natural consequence of British rule in Burma, English has been another major source of vocabulary, especially with regard to technology, measurements, and modern institutions.

[47] Another example is the word "vehicle", which is officially ယာဉ် [jɪ̃̀] (derived from Pali) but ကား [ká] (from English car) in spoken Burmese.

One example is the word "moon", which can be လ la̰ (native Tibeto-Burman), စန္ဒာ/စန်း [sàndà]/[sã́] (derivatives of Pali canda 'moon'), or သော်တာ [t̪ɔ̀ dà] (Sanskrit).

Burmese is a tonal language, which means phonemic contrasts can be made on the basis of the tone of a vowel.

[58] Some examples of words containing minor syllables: The Burmese alphabet consists of 33 letters and 12 vowels and is written from left to right.

Tone markings and vowel modifications are written as diacritics placed to the left, right, top, and bottom of letters.

Burmese is an agglutinative language with an extensive case system in which nouns are suffixed to determine their syntactic function in a sentence or clause.

The roots of Burmese verbs almost always have affixes which convey information like tense, aspect, intention, politeness, mood, etc.

ကလေးhka.le:/kʰəléchild၅nga:ŋáfiveယောက်yaukjaʊʔ/CLကလေး ၅ ယောက်hka.le: nga: yauk/kʰəlé ŋá jaʊʔ/child five CL"five children"Although Burmese does not have grammatical gender (e.g. masculine or feminine nouns), a distinction is made between the sexes, especially in animals and plants, by means of suffix particles.

Examples of usage are below: Burmese uses numerical classifiers (also called measure words) when nouns are counted or quantified.

Upper Burmese-specific usage, while historically and technically accurate, is increasingly viewed as distinctly rural or regional speech.

Burmese has complex character rendering requirements, where tone markings and vowel modifications are noted using diacritics.

Unicode compliant fonts have been more difficult to type than Zawgyi, as they have a stricter, less forgiving and arguably less intuitive method for ordering diacritics.

versions of smartphone soft-keyboards including Gboard and ttKeyboard[75] allow for more forgiving input sequences and Zawgyi keyboard layouts which produce Unicode-compliant text.

The layout, developed by the Myanmar Unicode and NLP Research Center, has a smart input system to cover the complex structures of Burmese and related scripts.

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Burmese:[79]လူတိုင်းသည် တူညီ လွတ်လပ်သော ဂုဏ်သိက္ခာဖြင့် လည်းကောင်း၊ တူညီလွတ်လပ်သော အခွင့်အရေးများဖြင့် လည်းကောင်း၊ မွေးဖွားလာသူများ ဖြစ်သည်။ ထိုသူတို့၌ ပိုင်းခြား ဝေဖန်တတ်သော ဉာဏ်နှင့် ကျင့်ဝတ် သိတတ်သော စိတ်တို့ရှိကြ၍ ထိုသူတို့သည် အချင်းချင်း မေတ္တာထား၍ ဆက်ဆံကျင့်သုံးသင့်၏။The romanization of the text into the Latin alphabet:lutuing:sany tu-nyi lwatlapsau: gun.sikhka.hprang.