Sino-Tibetan languages – Burmese

Burmese is a phonetic language with a total of 33 consonants, which form a syllable with a vowel. Burmese has four tones and is the official language of Brunei spoken by 28 million people. Yangon is the modern Burmese which uses Yangon pronunciation as the standard pronunciation. The written form is characterized by its round shape.

Birth of Old Malay – Bahasa Melayu

The 7th century saw the birth of Old Malay in South Sumatra. Old Malay had a lot of loanwords from Sanskrit and was widely used as a trade language. After the 14th century, there were dialects emerging in Malaya, Jakarta and Ambon. During then, the language spoken on the islands of South Pacific was simplified Malay. The Standard Malay spoken in Malaysia is also called Malaysian, which is different from Indonesian in some basic vocabularies, pronunciation, certain tense and sentence structure.