Burmese is a member of the Tibeto-Burman languages, which is a sub family of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Burmese is a tonal and analytic language. The language uses the Burmese script, derived from the Mon script, and ultimately from the Brahmi script.

Burmese is classified into two categories. One is formal, used in literary works, official publications, radio broadcasts and formal speeches. The other is colloquial which is used in daily conversation.

Despite its Upper Myanmar origins, the standard dialect of Burmese today comes from Yangon, because of the largest city's media influence. Most differences between Yangon (Lower Myanmar) and Mandalay (Upper Myanmar) are not in the accent or pronunciation but in the vocabulary usage. The most noticeable feature of the Mandalay dialect is its use of the pronoun (kya.nau) for both males and females, whereas in Yangon, (kya.ma) refers to females. Upper Myanmar speech still differentiates maternal and paternal sides of relatives whereas Lower Myanmar speech does not.

However, more distinctive accent and word usage differences emerge in the peripheral areas of the Ayeyarwady valley. Dialects include Merguese, Yaw, Palaw, Beik (Myeik) and Dawei (Tavoyan). The Rakhine dialect (Arakanese) is most reminiscent of archaic Burmese. Dialects in Tanintharyi Division (such as Beik) often reduce the intensity of the glottal stop. The Dawei dialect has preserved the medial, which is only found on old Burmese transcriptions. Despite vocabulary and pronunciation differences, there is mutual intelligibility among the dialects.

The Burmese Abugida is a script in the Brahmic family used in Myanmar for writing Burmese, Mon, Shan and several Kayin (Karen) dialects. The characters are rounded in appearance, because the traditional palm leaves used for writing would have been ripped into straight lines. Like English, it is written from left to right. There is no spaces between words, although informal writing often contains spaces after each clause.

In the side chart, the red text represents the traditional transliteration that corresponds to the letters' original Indian phonetic values.

However, since Burmese has undergone phonetic changes since the 12th century CE, many of the letters no longer represent the sounds they had 800 years ago.

The modern sounds that letters represent are therefore indicated in the blue texts surrounded by square brackets.

Representation of syllables with vowels other than /a/ is by means of diacritics or additional strokes near the letter. In addition, because Burmese is a tonal language, these diacritics carry not only the vowel values but also tones.

This means that the same vowel can be represented by several diacritics, each one of which carries a different tone. Burmese three major tones, namely "creaky", "high", and "low", and therefore each tone has a series of vowel diacritics.