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Pa-oh ပအိုဝ်း

About Me and My Language

Pa-oh National Flag

Orthography   Morphology   Story/Song   Word List   Syntax    Language Use     Dictionary

I was born to Pa-oh parents in a village called Htipase, located north-east of Taunggyi, Shan State (South), Myanmar (Burma). Pa-oh is my first language, I spoke it before I spoke Burmese, the country's official and majority language. When I was young, Burmese was the only language taught in school, and that is still true. So, before I started to write in Pa-oh, I already knew Burmese writing. I joined the LDTC workshop to learn basic langange documentation methods and standards, and created this project to document my native language for future development.

Your name (first, last)
  Ukkamsa (ဥက္ကံသ)
Contact Email ukkam[at]hawaii[dot]edu
Preferred name(s) of your language Pa-oh ပအိုဝ်း
Alternative names Pa'O, PaO, Taungthu, Taungsu, Tongsu
Language classification Sino-Tibetan
Geographical areas where spoken Shan State, Karen State, Mon State, Myanmar; Maehongson, Thailand.
Approximate number of monolingual speakers
Other languages spoken in the area/country Burmese, Shan, Karen, Mon
Official language(s) in your country Burmese
Does your language have a widely accepted writing system?
 Within the Pa-oh ethnic community only.
If yes, what materials are written?
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Background of the Language

Pa-oh is widely spoken by the Pa-oh people living in Southern Shan State in areas within the townships of Taunggyi, Hopone, Hsi Seng, Naung Tara, Peng Laung, Peng Lon, Kalaw, and Aung Ban. Thre are very few non-Pa-oh people that can speak Pa-oh, especially those who live in the cities or villages shared by Pa-oh. There are also a great number of Pa-oh that speak Pa-oh in Karen and Mon States in lower Myanmar. Their tone is slightly different from the highland Pa-oh as they live together with other ethnic communities of the respective state. It has altogether about 700,000 speakers. Pa-oh has a writing system and uses Burmese scripts, the official language of Myanmar. Burmese has three tones while Pa-oh has six tones. Nowadays, as more and more of the younger generation go to school that uses Burmese as medium of teaching, the number of people that use Pa-oh as their daily communication is decreasing. Even if everyone born of Pa-oh family can speak Pa-oh, many of them find themselves more confortable speaking Burmese rather than Pa-oh.
Source Reported number of speakers Vitality Assessment            
www.ethnologue.com 650,000 (1983)
www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/en/atlasmap.com No information available
www.endangeredlanguages.com No information available
www.wikipedia.com 650,000 (1983)
www.joshuaproject.net
 763,000

I took the number of speakers from online sources. But there are many things about the language that I could not find, because there was no any research done on the language by local or international scholars.

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