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72-450: The Kokang Self-Administered Zone ( Burmese : ကိုးကန့် ကိုယ်ပိုင်အုပ်ချုပ်ခွင့်ရ ဒေသ , Chinese : 果敢自治区 ), as stipulated by the 2008 Constitution of Myanmar , is a former De facto self-administered zone in northern Shan State . The zone is intended to be self-administered by the Kokang people . Its official name was announced by decree on 20 August 2010. It is recognized as illegal by

144-641: A criminal gang . Fraud factory operators lure foreign nationals to scam hubs, where they are forced into modern slavery , to scam internet users around the world into fraudulently buying cryptocurrencies or withdrawing cash via social media and online dating apps . A typical scam is known as " pig butchering ". Trafficked victims' passports are confiscated, and they are threatened with organ harvesting and forced prostitution if they do not successfully scam sufficiently. Fraud factory operations proliferated in Cambodia , Myanmar , Laos and other countries during

216-560: A pitch-register language like Shanghainese . There are four contrastive tones in Burmese. In the following table, the tones are shown marked on the vowel /a/ as an example. For example, the following words are distinguished from each other only on the basis of tone: In syllables ending with /ɰ̃/ , the checked tone is excluded: In spoken Burmese, some linguists classify two real tones (there are four nominal tones transcribed in written Burmese), "high" (applied to words that terminate with

288-507: A botched organ harvesting operation associated with a fraud factory in Myanmar. Myanmar is also an emerging destination for international labour trafficking, especially along its border areas. Victims in Myanmar include nationals from throughout Asia, including China, Hong Kong , India , Indonesia , Malaysia , Nepal , the Philippines , Taiwan , and Thailand. Victims are lured by

360-874: A former Union Solidarity and Development Party lawmaker as the chairman of the Kokang SAZ. In 2023, during Operation 1027 , the SAC temporarily replaced Myint Swe by Brigadier General Tun Tun Myint and put out a warrant for former Kokang SAZ chairman, Bai Xuoqian. Tun Tun Myint was previously the commander in charge of northern Shan State operations. The move is understood to be in anticipation of Operation 1027 moving towards Laukkai. A few days earlier, China had issued arrest warrants for junta-aligned cybercrime ringleader Ming Xuechang and three other family members for their involvement in online scamming operations . On 16 November 2023, three Ming family members were arrested and handed over to China. Ming Xuechang died while being arrested by

432-500: A former Regional Operations Command (ROC) chief of Laukkai, was imprisoned by Myanmar's military government for his alleged role in online scam operations, and was later given a death sentence in July. In 2024, Rappler reported that many in the Philippine media as well as government had been unaware that a large number of scam hubs in the Philippines had been operating in the country under

504-543: A lesser extent, Burmese has also imported words from Sanskrit (religion), Hindi (food, administration, and shipping), and Chinese (games and food). Burmese has also imported a handful of words from other European languages such as Portuguese . Here is a sample of loan words found in Burmese: Since the end of British rule, the Burmese government has attempted to limit usage of Western loans (especially from English) by coining new words ( neologisms ). For instance, for

576-409: A manhunt for Duterte's former spokesperson, Harry Roque , who has been on the run after questions on his sudden wealth led to questions about his role in a Pampanga POGO hub, identified as Lucky South 99, that was also managed by Cassandra Ong. In March 2024, the head of Interpol estimated that the combined profits of Southeast Asian organized crime networks were $ 2 to $ 3 trillion per year, with

648-659: A monk]", Lower Burmese speakers use [sʰʊ́ɰ̃] instead of [sʰwáɰ̃] , which is the pronunciation used in Upper Burma. The standard dialect is represented by the Yangon dialect because of the modern city's media influence and economic clout. In the past, the Mandalay dialect represented standard Burmese. The most noticeable feature of the Mandalay dialect is its use of the first person pronoun ကျွန်တော် , kya.nau [tɕənɔ̀] by both men and women, whereas in Yangon,

720-517: A number of commercial and residential properties in Clark , Pampanga , that resulted in the rescue of 1,300 victims and the confiscation of over ₱ 180 million in cash. By August, the committee discovered that many of these scam hubs had been "hiring" more locals than foreign nationals. In March 2024, more than 800 Filipinos and foreign nationals were rescued from a large scam hub in Bamban , Tarlac , after it

792-466: A stop or check, high-rising pitch) and "ordinary" (unchecked and non-glottal words, with falling or lower pitch), with those tones encompassing a variety of pitches. The "ordinary" tone consists of a range of pitches. Linguist L. F. Taylor concluded that "conversational rhythm and euphonic intonation possess importance" not found in related tonal languages and that "its tonal system is now in an advanced state of decay." The syllable structure of Burmese

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864-495: A typical criminal organization making $ 50 billion per year. Scam compounds are able to continue operating even though their locations are known, by bribing local law enforcement and politicians. As of 2024, organizations had allegedly harassed at least one researcher, using deep fakes to impersonate his father over phone and video chats, after stealing his phone number. Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar in Southeast Asia have been

936-700: A writing system, after Classical Chinese , Pyu , Old Tibetan and Tangut . The majority of Burmese speakers, who live throughout the Irrawaddy River Valley, use a number of largely similar dialects, while a minority speak non-standard dialects found in the peripheral areas of the country. These dialects include: Arakanese in Rakhine State and Marma in Bangladesh are also sometimes considered dialects of Burmese and sometimes as separate languages. Despite vocabulary and pronunciation differences, there

1008-618: Is mutual intelligibility among Burmese dialects, as they share a common set of tones, consonant clusters, and written script. However, several Burmese dialects differ substantially from standard Burmese with respect to vocabulary, lexical particles, and rhymes. Spoken Burmese is remarkably uniform among Burmese speakers, particularly those living in the Irrawaddy valley, all of whom use variants of Standard Burmese. The standard dialect of Burmese (the Mandalay - Yangon dialect continuum ) comes from

1080-607: Is C(G)V((V)C), which is to say the onset consists of a consonant optionally followed by a glide , and the rime consists of a monophthong alone, a monophthong with a consonant, or a diphthong with a consonant. The only consonants that can stand in the coda are /ʔ/ and /ɰ̃/ . Some representative words are: Fraud factory A fraud factory , fraud park or scam compound is a collection of large fraud organizations usually involved in human trafficking operations, generally found in Southeast Asia and usually operated by

1152-691: Is a member of the Lolo-Burmese grouping of the Sino-Tibetan language family . The Burmese alphabet is ultimately descended from a Brahmic script , either the Kadamba or Pallava alphabets. Burmese belongs to the Southern Burmish branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages , of which Burmese is the most widely spoken of the non- Sinitic languages. Burmese was the fifth of the Sino-Tibetan languages to develop

1224-570: Is administered by a Leading Body, which consists of at least ten members and includes Shan State Hluttaw (Assembly) members elected from the Zone and members nominated by the Burmese Armed Forces. The Leading Body performs both executive and legislative functions and is led by a Chairperson. The Leading Body has competence in ten areas of policy, including urban and rural development, road construction and maintenance, and public health. Bai Xuoqian

1296-731: Is known as " pig butchering ". The trafficked Kenyans were prevented from leaving unless they paid 1.2 million Kenyan shillings and were threatened with forced sex work and organ harvesting if they did not meet work performance targets. Two victims who spoke to the BBC were rescued by Awareness Against Human Trafficking . Traffickers confiscate their victims' passports. Some trafficking victims have returned to Kenya with broken limbs, from beatings by their captors. Vietnamese charity organization Blue Dragon reported that trafficking victims forced to work in scamming operations in Myanmar, are forced to sell their organs if they fail to meet quotas. During

1368-442: Is pronounced [mõ̀ũndã́ĩ] . The vowels of Burmese are: The monophthongs /e/ , /o/ , /ə/ , /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ occur only in open syllables (those without a syllable coda ); the diphthongs /ei/ , /ou/ , /ai/ and /au/ occur only in closed syllables (those with a syllable coda). /ə/ only occurs in a minor syllable , and is the only vowel that is permitted in a minor syllable (see below). The close vowels /i/ and /u/ and

1440-580: Is the value of the four native final nasals: ⟨မ်⟩ /m/ , ⟨န်⟩ /n/ , ⟨ဉ်⟩ /ɲ/ , ⟨င်⟩ /ŋ/ , as well as the retroflex ⟨ဏ⟩ /ɳ/ (used in Pali loans) and nasalisation mark anusvara demonstrated here above ka (က → ကံ) which most often stands in for a homorganic nasal word medially as in တံခါး tankhá 'door', and တံတား tantá 'bridge', or else replaces final -m ⟨မ်⟩ in both Pali and native vocabulary, especially after

1512-635: Is the word "moon", which can be လ la̰ (native Tibeto-Burman), စန္ဒာ/စန်း [sàndà]/[sã́] (derivatives of Pali canda 'moon'), or သော်တာ [t̪ɔ̀ dà] (Sanskrit). The consonants of Burmese are as follows: According to Jenny & San San Hnin Tun (2016 :15), contrary to their use of symbols θ and ð, consonants of သ are dental stops ( /t̪, d̪/ ), rather than fricatives ( /θ, ð/ ) or affricates. These phonemes, alongside /sʰ/ , are prone to merger with /t, d, s/ . An alveolar /ɹ/ can occur as an alternate of /j/ in some loanwords. The final nasal /ɰ̃/

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1584-486: The [ ɹ ] sound, which has become [ j ] in standard Burmese. Moreover, Arakanese features a variety of vowel differences, including the merger of the ဧ [e] and ဣ [i] vowels. Hence, a word like "blood" သွေး is pronounced [θw é ] in standard Burmese and [θw í ] in Arakanese. The Burmese language's early forms include Old Burmese and Middle Burmese . Old Burmese dates from

1656-569: The /l/ medial, which is otherwise only found in Old Burmese inscriptions. They also often reduce the intensity of the glottal stop . Beik has 250,000 speakers while Tavoyan has 400,000. The grammatical constructs of Burmese dialects in Southern Myanmar show greater Mon influence than Standard Burmese. The most pronounced feature of the Arakanese language of Rakhine State is its retention of

1728-518: The Burmese alphabet began employing cursive-style circular letters typically used in palm-leaf manuscripts , as opposed to the traditional square block-form letters used in earlier periods. The orthographic conventions used in written Burmese today can largely be traced back to Middle Burmese. Modern Burmese emerged in the mid-18th century. By this time, male literacy in Burma stood at nearly 50%, which enabled

1800-607: The COVID-19 pandemic and their activities increasingly focused on fraud factories thereafter to regain lost revenue. Between August and late September 2022, the Kenyan embassy in Thailand facilitated the rescue of 76 trafficking victims. The victims were mostly Kenyan, and included Ugandans and a Burundian. The criminal gangs who operated the fraud factories had been targeting young and educated Africans. In November 2022, one Kenyan died after

1872-576: The COVID-19 pandemic and were further aided by the civil war in Myanmar . The term fraud factory first appeared in a 2022 Sydney Morning Herald article about the Southeast Asian scams and human trafficking industry and was coined by Jan Santiago of the Global Anti-Scam Organization (GASO), a victims advocacy group, in describing scamming operations in the region. The term was used by Kenya's Ministry of Foreign Affairs for

1944-602: The English language in the colonial educational system, especially in higher education. In the 1930s, the Burmese language saw a linguistic revival, precipitated by the establishment of an independent University of Rangoon in 1920 and the inception of a Burmese language major at the university by Pe Maung Tin , modeled on Anglo Saxon language studies at the University of Oxford. Student protests in December of that year, triggered by

2016-686: The Kachin conflict is occurring, a factor that makes rescues difficult. In 2022, The Japan Times reported that factories which initially started operations in Cambodia later switched locations to Laos, and that victims were held in special economic zones in Laos and Myanmar, specifically in Myawaddy , as well as casinos in Cambodia, particularly in Sihanoukville . The trafficked victims are lured with job offers, with

2088-590: The Kokang incident . On 17 February 2015, Myanmar president Thein Sein declared a state of emergency three-month period of martial law in Kokang in response to fighting between government troops and the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, a rebel group. The curfew was extended on 9 September 2019. A coup d'état took place on 1 February 2021, resulting in a military junta taking control of

2160-714: The Mon people , who until recently formed the majority in Lower Burma . Most Mon loanwords are so well assimilated that they are not distinguished as loanwords, as Burmese and Mon were used interchangeably for several centuries in pre-colonial Burma. Mon loans are often related to flora, fauna, administration, textiles, foods, boats, crafts, architecture, and music. As a natural consequence of British rule in Burma , English has been another major source of vocabulary, especially with regard to technology, measurements, and modern institutions. English loanwords tend to take one of three forms: To

2232-522: The Myanma Salonpaung Thatpon Kyan ( မြန်မာ စာလုံးပေါင်း သတ်ပုံ ကျမ်း ), was compiled in 1978 by the commission. Burmese is a diglossic language with two distinguishable registers (or diglossic varieties ): The literary form of Burmese retains archaic and conservative grammatical structures and modifiers (including affixes and pronouns) no longer used in the colloquial form. Literary Burmese, which has not changed significantly since

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2304-553: The Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA). During the 1960s, the Burmese Communist Party controlled large areas of Kokang, but as it began to disintegrate in the 1980s, Pheung Kya-shin (Peng Jiasheng) established the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA). In 1989, he negotiated a ceasefire with the military and was given some autonomy over the area. After the ceasefire,

2376-591: The Myanmar civil war , the Three Brotherhood Alliance launched Operation 1027 against the Myanmar military regime on 27 October 2023, with one of the intended goals being to eradicate scam centers in the Kokang Self-Administered Zone along the northeastern border with China, which had grown frustrated with the Myanmar government's lack of response against fraud factories. On 5 January 2024,

2448-605: The Pyu language . These indirect borrowings can be traced back to orthographic idiosyncrasies in these loanwords, such as the Burmese word "to worship", which is spelt ပူဇော် ( pūjo ) instead of ပူဇာ ( pūjā ), as would be expected by the original Pali orthography. The transition to Middle Burmese occurred in the 16th century. The transition to Middle Burmese included phonological changes (e.g. mergers of sound pairs that were distinct in Old Burmese) as well as accompanying changes in

2520-413: The 11th to the 16th century ( Pagan to Ava dynasties); Middle Burmese from the 16th to the 18th century ( Toungoo to early Konbaung dynasties); modern Burmese from the mid-18th century to the present. Word order , grammatical structure, and vocabulary have remained markedly stable well into Modern Burmese, with the exception of lexical content (e.g., function words ). The earliest attested form of

2592-457: The 13th century, is the register of Burmese taught in schools. In most cases, the corresponding affixes in the literary and spoken forms are totally unrelated to each other. Examples of this phenomenon include the following lexical terms: Historically the literary register was preferred for written Burmese on the grounds that "the spoken style lacks gravity, authority, dignity". In the mid-1960s, some Burmese writers spearheaded efforts to abandon

2664-410: The 19th century, in addition to concomitant economic and political instability in Upper Burma (e.g., increased tax burdens from the Burmese crown, British rice production incentives, etc.) also accelerated the migration of Burmese speakers from Upper Burma into Lower Burma. British rule in Burma eroded the strategic and economic importance of the Burmese language; Burmese was effectively subordinated to

2736-523: The BBC reporting one victim having traveled to Thailand for a job before being driven to Laos. Fraud factory workers are trained to create online social media and dating personas, which they use to build up trust with westerners and engage in fake romance scams, with the goal of encouraging the westerners to buy cryptocurrencies. The targets of the bait and switch cyber crime were predominantly US citizens. The process of fraudulently building up trust with victims online in order to sell them cryptocurrencies

2808-521: The British in the lead-up to the independence of Burma in 1948. The 1948 Constitution of Burma prescribed Burmese as the official language of the newly independent nation. The Burma Translation Society and Rangoon University's Department of Translation and Publication were established in 1947 and 1948, respectively, with the joint goal of modernizing the Burmese language in order to replace English across all disciplines. Anti-colonial sentiment throughout

2880-552: The Buddhist clergy (monks) from the laity ( householders ), especially when speaking to or about bhikkhus (monks). The following are examples of varying vocabulary used for Buddhist clergy and for laity: Burmese primarily has a monosyllabic received Sino-Tibetan vocabulary. Nonetheless, many words, especially loanwords from Indo-European languages like English, are polysyllabic, and others, from Mon, an Austroasiatic language, are sesquisyllabic . Burmese loanwords are overwhelmingly in

2952-656: The Burmese language into Lower Burma also coincided with the emergence of Modern Burmese. As late as the mid-1700s, Mon , an Austroasiatic language, was the principal language of Lower Burma, employed by the Mon people who inhabited the region. Lower Burma's shift from Mon to Burmese was accelerated by the Burmese-speaking Konbaung Dynasty 's victory over the Mon-speaking Restored Hanthawaddy Kingdom in 1757. By 1830, an estimated 90% of

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3024-462: The Burmese language is called Old Burmese , dating to the 11th and 12th century stone inscriptions of Pagan . The earliest evidence of the Burmese alphabet is dated to 1035, while a casting made in the 18th century of an old stone inscription points to 984. Owing to the linguistic prestige of Old Pyu in the Pagan Kingdom era, Old Burmese borrowed a substantial corpus of vocabulary from Pali via

3096-490: The Irrawaddy River valley. Regional differences between speakers from Upper Burma (e.g., Mandalay dialect), called anya tha ( အညာသား ) and speakers from Lower Burma (e.g., Yangon dialect), called auk tha ( အောက်သား ), largely occur in vocabulary choice, not in pronunciation. Minor lexical and pronunciation differences exist throughout the Irrawaddy River valley. For instance, for the term ဆွမ်း , "food offering [to

3168-405: The Myanmar police, and the Myanmar government claimed that he died by suicide. According to The Diplomat , this move signals China's "tacit support for the removal of the Kokang SAZ's leadership". As stipulated by the 2008 constitution, Kokang Self-Administered Zone consists of two townships: Konkyan and Laukkaing , both townships are administratively part of Laukkaing District . However,

3240-476: The OB vowel *u e.g. ငံ ngam 'salty', သုံး thóum ('three; use'), and ဆုံး sóum 'end'. It does not, however, apply to ⟨ည်⟩ which is never realised as a nasal, but rather as an open front vowel [iː] [eː] or [ɛː] . The final nasal is usually realised as nasalisation of the vowel. It may also allophonically appear as a homorganic nasal before stops. For example, in /mòʊɰ̃dáɪɰ̃/ ('storm'), which

3312-512: The Philippines and Thailand. In May 2023, the Philippine Senate 's Committee on Women, Children, Family Relations and Gender Equality conducted an inquiry into the proliferation of illegal activities involving foreign nationals, including human trafficking and racketeering, within scam hubs in various points of the archipelago. Senator Risa Hontiveros presented videos and reports of recent raids made by Philippine law enforcement agencies on

3384-464: The Self-Administered Zone is de facto divided into two townships, two subtownships and one area: 23°44′31″N 98°34′49″E  /  23.74194°N 98.58028°E  / 23.74194; 98.58028 Burmese language Burmese is a tonal , pitch-register , and syllable-timed language , largely monosyllabic and agglutinative with a subject–object–verb word order. It

3456-473: The activity of trafficking victims to Asia where they use digital media to meet westerners and sell them cryptocurrencies. In Chinese, the term "fraud industrial park" ( Chinese : 詐騙 園區 ; pinyin : zhàpiàn yuánqū ; lit. 'fraud park zone') has emerged in reference to these operations. Fraud factories are often operated by Chinese criminal gangs based in Southeast Asia. The gang's traditional revenue stream of gambling reduced during

3528-491: The adoption of neologisms. An example is the word "university", formerly ယူနီဗာစတီ [jùnìbàsətì] , from English university , now တက္ကသိုလ် [tɛʔkət̪ò] , a Pali-derived neologism recently created by the Burmese government and derived from the Pali spelling of Taxila ( တက္ကသီလ Takkasīla ), an ancient university town in modern-day Pakistan. Some words in Burmese may have many synonyms, each having certain usages, such as formal, literary, colloquial, and poetic. One example

3600-488: The alliance fully captured the city of Laukkai in Kokang from the Myanmar military, and soon more than 40,000 people involved in Kokang's fraud factories were returned to China. Analyst Jason Tower called their operation "extremely successful" in eradicating scam centers from Kokang, although some syndicates were able to move their operations to Cambodia , Laos , and Myanmar's Kayin State . By March 2024, Brig. Gen. Zaw Min,

3672-522: The area controlled by MNDAA became Myanmar's " Shan State Special Region No. 1 " ( Chinese : 缅甸掸邦第一特区 ; Burmese : မြန်မာနိုင်ငံ ရှမ်းပြည်နယ်အထူးဒေသ (၁) ). Pheung was known unofficially as the 'King of Kokang' and he and the MNDAA had been involved in the drug industry since the 1970s in Kokang, where he trafficked heroin and later methamphetamine. However, Pheung later shifted the area's industry away from drugs and towards gambling. Peng lost control in 2009 in

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3744-525: The close portions of the diphthongs are somewhat mid-centralized ( [ɪ, ʊ] ) in closed syllables, i.e. before /ɰ̃/ and /ʔ/ . Thus နှစ် /n̥iʔ/ ('two') is phonetically [n̥ɪʔ] and ကြောင် /tɕàũ/ ('cat') is phonetically [tɕàʊ̃] . Burmese is a tonal language , which means phonemic contrasts can be made on the basis of the tone of a vowel. In Burmese, these contrasts involve not only pitch , but also phonation , intensity (loudness), duration, and vowel quality. However, some linguists consider Burmese

3816-457: The country and triggering a civil war . In October 2023, anti-junta forces launched a military operation in northern Myanmar. On 28 December it was reported that "most" of the regional capital, Laukkai , was now under MNDAA control, with junta forces largely abandoning the city. The MNDAA gained full control of Laukkai following a mass surrender of the last junta forces in the city on 5 January 2024. The Kokang Self-Administered Zone (Kokang SAZ)

3888-593: The country. These varieties include the Yaw , Palaw, Myeik (Merguese), Tavoyan and Intha dialects . Despite substantial vocabulary and pronunciation differences, there is mutual intelligibility among most Burmese dialects. Below is a summary of lexical similarity between major Burmese dialects: Dialects in Tanintharyi Region , including Palaw, Merguese, and Tavoyan, are especially conservative in comparison to Standard Burmese. The Tavoyan and Intha dialects have preserved

3960-647: The early post-independence era led to a reactionary switch from English to Burmese as the national medium of education, a process that was accelerated by the Burmese Way to Socialism . In August 1963, the socialist Union Revolutionary Government established the Literary and Translation Commission (the immediate precursor of the Myanmar Language Commission ) to standardize Burmese spelling, diction, composition, and terminology. The latest spelling authority, named

4032-640: The false promise of high-paying jobs, and are trafficked through major cities like Yangon and Bangkok , and transit points like Mae Sot and Chiang Rai . They are then forced to work in " special economic zones " along Myanmar's borders, such as Shwe Kokko . In late 2023, the United Nations Human Rights Office estimated that at least 120,000 people in Myanmar were trafficked there and are being held in online scam compounds. At least 100,000 people are being held in similar circumstances in Cambodia. Other operations were also being run in Laos,

4104-598: The form of nouns . Historically, Pali , the liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism , had a profound influence on Burmese vocabulary. Burmese has readily adopted words of Pali origin; this may be due to phonotactic similarities between the two languages, alongside the fact that the script used for Burmese can be used to reproduce Pali spellings with complete accuracy. Pali loanwords are often related to religion, government, arts, and science. Burmese loanwords from Pali primarily take four forms: Burmese has also adapted numerous words from Mon, traditionally spoken by

4176-515: The introduction of English into matriculation examinations , fueled growing demand for Burmese to become the medium of education in British Burma; a short-lived but symbolic parallel system of "national schools" that taught in Burmese, was subsequently launched. The role and prominence of the Burmese language in public life and institutions was championed by Burmese nationalists, intertwined with their demands for greater autonomy and independence from

4248-540: The legal cover of Philippine Offshore Gaming Operator (POGO) licenses that were issued by the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation ; although POGO licensees were first issued in 2003, they flourished during the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte . A 2024 congressional investigation of scam and trafficking operations by a Tarlac POGO hub led to the arrest of Bamban mayor Alice Guo and her alleged sister and sister-in-law, Shiela Guo and Cassandra Ong , as well as

4320-515: The literary form, asserting that the spoken vernacular form ought to be used. Some Burmese linguists such as Minn Latt , a Czech academic, proposed moving away from the high form of Burmese altogether. Although the literary form is heavily used in written and official contexts (literary and scholarly works, radio news broadcasts, and novels), the recent trend has been to accommodate the spoken form in informal written contexts. Nowadays, television news broadcasts, comics, and commercial publications use

4392-499: The most known fraud factory destinations. These countries are particularly vulnerable due to their strategic location next to China and weak law enforcement. Below are known cyber scam hotspots: In November 2023, China issued arrest warrants for junta -aligned Ming Xuechang, and three other Ming family members for their involvement in online scamming operations. Ming later committed suicide. The other three were captured by Burmese authorities and handed over to China. In August 2024,

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4464-636: The population in Lower Burma self-identified as Burmese-speaking Bamars; huge swaths of former Mon-speaking territory, from the Irrawaddy Delta to upriver in the north, spanning Bassein (now Pathein) and Rangoon (now Yangon) to Tharrawaddy, Toungoo, Prome (now Pyay), and Henzada (now Hinthada), were now Burmese-speaking. The language shift has been ascribed to a combination of population displacement, intermarriage, and voluntary changes in self-identification among increasingly Mon–Burmese bilingual populations in

4536-425: The region. Standardized tone marking in written Burmese was not achieved until the 18th century. From the 19th century onward, orthographers created spellers to reform Burmese spelling, because of ambiguities that arose over transcribing sounds that had been merged. British rule saw continued efforts to standardize Burmese spelling through dictionaries and spellers. Britain's gradual annexation of Burma throughout

4608-506: The said pronoun is used only by male speakers while ကျွန်မ , kya.ma. [tɕəma̰] is used by female speakers. Moreover, with regard to kinship terminology , Upper Burmese speakers differentiate the maternal and paternal sides of a family, whereas Lower Burmese speakers do not. The Mon language has also influenced subtle grammatical differences between the varieties of Burmese spoken in Lower and Upper Burma. In Lower Burmese varieties,

4680-764: The spoken form or a combination of the spoken and simpler, less ornate formal forms. The following sample sentence reveals that differences between literary and spoken Burmese mostly occur in affixes: Burmese has politeness levels and honorifics that take the speaker's status and age in relation to the audience into account. The suffix ပါ pa is frequently used after a verb to express politeness. Moreover, Burmese pronouns relay varying degrees of deference or respect. In many instances, polite speech (e.g., addressing teachers, officials, or elders) employs feudal-era third person pronouns or kinship terms in lieu of first- and second-person pronouns. Furthermore, with regard to vocabulary choice, spoken Burmese clearly distinguishes

4752-448: The traditional homeland of Burmese speakers. The 1891 Census of India , conducted five years after the annexation of the entire Konbaung Kingdom , found that the former kingdom had an "unusually high male literacy" rate of 62.5% for Upper Burmans aged 25 and above. For all of British Burma , the literacy rate was 49% for men and 5.5% for women (by contrast, British India more broadly had a male literacy rate of 8.44%). The expansion of

4824-425: The underlying orthography . From the 1500s onward, Burmese kingdoms saw substantial gains in the populace's literacy rate , which manifested itself in greater participation of laymen in scribing and composing legal and historical documents, domains that were traditionally the domain of Buddhist monks, and drove the ensuing proliferation of Burmese literature , both in terms of genres and works. During this period,

4896-455: The verb ပေး ('to give') is colloquially used as a permissive causative marker, like in other Southeast Asian languages, but unlike in other Tibeto-Burman languages. This usage is hardly used in Upper Burmese varieties, and is considered a sub-standard construct. More distinctive non-standard varieties emerge as one moves farther away from the Irrawaddy River valley toward peripheral areas of

4968-459: The wide circulation of legal texts, royal chronicles , and religious texts. A major reason for the uniformity of the Burmese language was the near-universal presence of Buddhist monasteries (called kyaung ) in Burmese villages. These kyaung served as the foundation of the pre-colonial monastic education system, which fostered uniformity of the language throughout the Upper Irrawaddy valley,

5040-410: The word "television", Burmese publications are mandated to use the term ရုပ်မြင်သံကြား (lit. 'see picture, hear sound') in lieu of တယ်လီဗီးရှင်း , a direct English transliteration. Another example is the word "vehicle", which is officially ယာဉ် [jɪ̃̀] (derived from Pali) but ကား [ká] (from English car ) in spoken Burmese. Some previously common English loanwords have fallen out of use with

5112-629: Was elected as an MP of the Amyotha Hluttaw representing Laukkai Constituency No. 2. during the 2010 general election , and became the first head of the Kokang SAZ. Under his rule, the region became known for drugs and weapons trafficking. Bai was not very popular and survived an assassination attempt in March 2012. On 3 February 2021, shortly after the 2021 Myanmar coup d'état , the State Administration Council (SAC) appointed Myint Swe,

5184-449: Was raided for alleged illegal activities that included crypto and love scams; the hub was legally registered as a Philippine Offshore Gaming Operator (POGO) firm. In August 2024, another 162 foreign nationals were rescued from scam hubs in Cebu illegally operating as POGOs. In 2022, BBC News reported the locations of fraud factories as being in Laos and Myanmar, notably in Kachin where

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