This book provides a detailed description and a cross-dialectal comparison of the major dialects of Myanmar. The fieldwork was carried out under very difficult conditions in Myanmar, which makes this material all the more valuable. Chapter 1 provides phonological and grammatical sketches of 8 major Burmese dialects, while Chapter 2 describes in detail the particular features of their repertoire of initial consonants, rhymes, and tones and remarks on their systems of particles. The Appendices are devoted to detailed lexicons of the dialects, largely based on the first author’s personal fieldwork. Each dialect is exemplified with approximately 1800 forms. Comprising by far the largest corpora of such data ever assembled in one place, the research on tonal systems presented in this book contributes significantly to the tone study of the world’s languages.
