[3] Around the 15th or 16th centuries, the Mon–Burmese script was borrowed and adapted to write a Tai language of northern Burma.

[6] However, it is believed that the Ahom people had already adopted their script before migrating to the Brahmaputra Valley in the 13th century.

It is written left to right [2] The representation of the vowels depends partly on whether the syllable has a final consonant.

Having been reformed recently, Shan lacks many of the historical spelling remnants in Thai and Burmese.

The number of consonants in a textbook may vary: there are 19 universally accepted Shan consonants (ၵ ၶ င ၸ သ ၺ တ ထ ၼ ပ ၽ ၾ မ ယ ရ လ ဝ ႁ ဢ) and five more which represent sounds not found in Shan, g, z, b, d and th [θ].

The Shan script has been encoded as a part of the Myanmar block with the release version of Unicode 3.0.