Burmese (မြန်မာဘာသာစကား (or) ဗမာဘာသာစကား) is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Myanmar, where it is the official language, lingua franca, and the native language of the Bamar, the country's largest ethnic group. The Constitution of Myanmar officially refers to it as the Myanmar language in English, though most English speakers continue to refer to the language as Burmese, after Burma—a name with co-official status until 1989 (see Names of Myanmar). Burmese is the most widely spoken language in the country, where it serves as the lingua franca. In 2019, Burmese was spoken by 42.9 million people globally, including by 32.9 million speakers as a first language and 10 million as a second language. A 2023 World Bank survey found that 80% of the country's population speaks Burmese. Burmese dialects are also spoken by some of the indigenous tribes in Bangladesh's Chittagong Hill Tracts, China's Yunnan province, and India's northeastern states, as well as by Burmese diaspora.

Burmese is a tonal, pitch-register, and syllable-timed language, largely monosyllabic and agglutinative with a subject–object–verb word order. Burmese is distinguished from other major Southeast Asian languages by its extensive case marking system and rich morphological inventory. It is a member of the Lolo-Burmese grouping of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The Burmese alphabet ultimately descends from a Brahmic script, either the Kadamba or Pallava alphabet.

Burmese belongs to the Southern Burmish branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages. It is the most widely spoken of the non-Sinitic Sino-Tibetan languages. Burmese was the fifth Sino-Tibetan language to develop a writing system, after Classical Chinese, Pyu, Old Tibetan, and Tangut.

Most Burmese speakers, who live throughout the Irrawaddy River Valley, use variants of standard Burmese, 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 India are also sometimes considered dialects of Burmese and sometimes separate languages.

Burmese dialects mostly share a common set of tones, consonant clusters, and written script. Several Burmese dialects differ substantially from standard Burmese with respect to vocabulary, lexical particles, and rhymes. Below is a summary of lexical similarity between major Burmese dialects:

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) originates from 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, not pronunciation. Minor lexical and rhyme differences exist throughout the Irrawaddy River valley. For instance, for the term ဆွမ်း, "food offering [to a monk]", Lower Burmese speakers use [sʰʊ́ɰ̃] instead of [sʰwáɰ̃], the pronunciation used in Upper Burma.

The standard dialect is typified by the Yangon dialect because of the modern city's media influence and economic clout. Formerly, the Mandalay dialect represented standard Burmese. The Mandalay dialect's most noticeable feature is its continued use of the first-person pronoun ကျွန်တော်, kya.nau [tɕənɔ̀] by both men and women. In Yangon, only male speakers use the same pronoun, while female speakers use ကျွန်မ, kya.ma. [tɕəma̰]. Moreover, with regard to kinship terminology, Upper Burmese speakers differentiate the maternal and paternal sides of a family while Lower Burmese speakers do not.