Myanmar is a

Unicode block A Unicode block is one of several contiguous ranges of numeric character codes (code points) of the Unicode character set that are defined by the Unicode Consortium for administrative and documentation purposes. Typically, proposals such as the ad ...

containing characters for the Burmese, Mon, Shan, Palaung, and the

Karen languages The Karen () or Karenic languages are tonal languages spoken by some seven million Karen people. They are of unclear affiliation within the Sino-Tibetan languages. The Karen languages are written using the Karen script. The three main branches ...

of Myanmar, as well as the

Aiton Aiton may refer to: People *Aiton (surname) *Standard author abbreviation of William Aiton (1731 – 1793), Scottish botanist Places * Aiton, Cluj, a commune in Romania * Aiton, Savoie, a commune in France Other uses * Tai Aiton people, one of ...

and Phake languages of Northeast India. It is also used to write Pali and Sanskrit in Myanmar.

Block

The block has sixteen variation sequences defined for standardized variants. They use (VS01) to denote the dotted letters used for the Khamti,

, and Phake languages. (Note that this is font dependent. For example, the Padauk font supports some of the dotted forms.)

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Myanmar block:

Historic and nonstandard uses of range

In Unicode 1.0.0, part of the current Myanmar block was used for Tibetan. In Microsoft Windows,

collation Collation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. Many systems of collation are based on numerical order or alphabetical order, or extensions and combinations thereof. Collation is a fundamental element of most office fil ...

data referring to the old Tibetan block was retained as late as

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was release to manufacturing, released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Wind ...

, and removed in

Windows 2003 Windows Server 2003 is the sixth version of Windows Server operating system produced by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows NT family of operating systems and was released to manufacturing on March 28, 2003 and generally available on April ...

. In

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 ...

, devices and software localisation often use Zawgyi fonts rather than Unicode-compliant fonts. These use the same range as the Unicode Myanmar block (0x1000–0x109F), and are even applied to text encoded like

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit''. UTF-8 is capable of ...

(although Zawgyi text does not officially constitute UTF-8), despite only a subset of the code points being interpreted the same way. Zawgyi lacks support for Myanmar-script languages other than Burmese, but heuristic methods exist for detecting the encoding of text which is assumed to be Burmese.

References

{{reflist Unicode blocks