The Myeik dialect, also known as Beik in
Burmese, Mergui and Merguese in
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ...
, and Marit (มะริด) in
Thai, is a divergent
dialect
The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena:
One usage refers to a variety of a language that is ...
of
Burmese, spoken in
Myeik, the second largest town in
Tanintharyi Region
Tanintharyi Region ( my, တနင်္သာရီတိုင်းဒေသကြီး, ; Mon: or ; ms, Tanah Sari; formerly Tenasserim Division and subsequently Tanintharyi Division, th, ตะนาวศรี, RTGS: ''Tanao Si'', ; ...
, the southernmost region of
Myanmar
Myanmar, ; UK pronunciations: US pronunciations incl. . Note: Wikipedia's IPA conventions require indicating /r/ even in British English although only some British English speakers pronounce r at the end of syllables. As John Wells explai ...
. Myeik shares many commonalities with the
Tavoyan dialect
The Tavoyan or Dawei dialect of Burmese () is spoken in Dawei (Tavoy), in the coastal Tanintharyi Region of southern Myanmar (Burma).
Tavoyan retains medial that has since merged into the medial in standard Burmese and can form the following ...
, although there are substantial differences especially with regard to
phonology
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
.
Phonology
Consonants
Myeik possesses 27 consonant phonemes:
Unlike Standard Burmese, the Myeik dialect does not have any
preaspirated In phonetics, preaspiration (sometimes spelled pre-aspiration) is a period of Voice (phonetics), voicelessness or Aspiration (phonetics), aspiration preceding the closure of a voiceless obstruent, basically equivalent to an -like sound preceding the ...
consonants. Phonemes unique to the Myeik dialect include and .
Mergui Archipelago
The Mergui Archipelago (also Myeik Archipelago or ''Myeik Kyunzu''; my, မြိတ်ကျွန်းစု) is located in far southern Myanmar (Burma) and is part of the Tanintharyi Region. It consists of more than 800 islands, varying i ...
Vowels
The Myeik dialect has three types of
vowels
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (len ...
: plain,
nasalized
In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is .
In the Internationa ...
and
glottalized
Glottalization is the complete or partial closure of the glottis during the articulation of another sound. Glottalization of vowels and other sonorants is most often realized as creaky voice (partial closure). Glottalization of obstruent consona ...
, with each type having seven vowels.
Notes
References
*
{{Burmese language
Burmese language