Mon is a member of the Monic branch of the Austroasiatic language family spoken in parts of Myanmar/Burma and Thailand. In 2004 there were 850,000 speakers, mainly in Mon State, and also in the Tanintharyi Region and Kayin State in southern Myanmar.
The language was widely spoken in southern Burma until the middle of the 19th century, when the area was taken over by the British. After then large numbers of people migrated to the area from India and China, and Mon became marginalized.
Mon was first written during the 6th century AD in two different scripts: one derived from the Grantha script, and one derived from the Kadamba or Grantha script. The Mon script first appeared in the Mayzedi inscriptions in 1113.
Download an alphabet chart for Mon (Excel)
ဇၟာပ်မၞိဟ်ဂှ် ကတဵုဒှ်ကၠုင်လဝ် နကဵု ဂုဏ်သိက္ခာကီု နကဵု အခေါင်အရာကီု တုပ်သၟဟ် ရေင်သကအ် သီုညးဖအိုတ်ရ၊၊ ကောန်မၞိဟ်တအ်ဂှ် ဟိုတ်မၞုံကဵုအစောံသတ္တိ မပါ်ပါဲ ဟိုတ်ဖိုလ် ကေုာံ ခိုဟ်ပရေအ်တအ်တုဲ ညးမွဲကေုာံညးမွဲ သ္ဒးဆက်ဆောံ နကဵု စိုတ်ကောဒေအ်ရ၊၊
(ပိုဒ် ၁၊ လလောင်တရး အခေါင်အရာမၞိဟ် ဂၠးကဝ်)
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
(Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
Details of the Mon script provided by Michael Peter Füstumum, with corrections by Mattias Persson. Sample text translated by Bee Htaw Monzel
Information about Mon | Phrases | Numbers
Information about the Mon language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mon_language
https://www.ethnologue.com/language/mnw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mon_script
http://www.comparativelinguistics.uzh.ch/dam/jcr:ffffffff-f914-30c6-ffff-ffffd45ca81c/Introduction_to_the_Mon_language.pdf
http://www.comparativelinguistics.uzh.ch/staff/mathiasjenny/download/TheMonLanguageInThailandAndMyanmarMJ2015.pdf
https://www.scribd.com/document/20473584/Romanization-for-Mon-Script-by-Transliteration-Method
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Page last modified: 07.08.24
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