It is also spoken in pockets in other parts of Myanmar, in Northern Thailand, in Yunnan, in Laos, in Cambodia, in Vietnam and decreasingly in Assam and Meghalaya.

[2][1] The Mahidol University Institute for Language and Culture estimates there are gave the number of Shan speakers in Thailand as 95,000 in 2006.

[citation needed] Many Shan speak local dialects as well as the language of their trading partners.

Burmese appears to have also influenced Shan grammar, with respect to the use of complex prepositions and certain word patterns that do not exist in closely related Tai languages.

[3] Due to labour migration in recent decades, one million ethnic Shan now live in Thailand.

[3][4] As a result of ongoing language contact, Thai has increasingly become a competing source of loanwords into Shan, especially for scientific and political concepts.

[3] Some recent phonological developments, like the reversal of the historical /f/ > /pʰ/ shift especially among younger Shan speakers, is attributed to contact with Thai.

While the southern dialect has borrowed more Burmese words, eastern Shan is somewhat closer to Northern Thai language and Lao in vocabulary and pronunciation, and the northern so-called "Chinese Shan" is much influenced by the Yunnan-Chinese dialect.

J. Marvin Brown divides the three dialects of Shan State as follows:[5] Prominent divergent dialects are considered separate languages, such as Khün (called Kon Shan by the Burmese), which is spoken in Kengtung valley.

Shan has no systematic distinction between long and short vowels characteristic of Thai.