Sino-Tibetan · ISO 639-3 rmz
Marma Language ရက္ခိုင်ဘာသာ
Marma is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken by about 1.2 million people in 2 countries. It is written in the Bangla and Myanmar scripts.
Where Marma is spoken
- Official language
- Regional official
- Spoken by 10%+
- 1–10%
- Smaller communities
Countries that speak Marma
Language family
- Sino-Tibetan
- Burmo-Qiangic
- Lolo-Burmese
- Burmish
- Southern Burmish
- Mranmaic
- Nuclear Mranmaic
- Arakanese-Marma
- Marma
Writing system
Bangla and Myanmar scripts
Related languages
About the Marma language
Marma (ရက္ခိုင်ဘာသာ) is spoken by about 1.2 million people, which makes it the 412th most spoken language in the world — just behind Venda (1.3 million) and ahead of Sakalava Malagasy (1.2 million). It belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family and, more precisely, to the Arakanese-Marma group within the Lolo-Burmese branch.
Where is Marma spoken?
Marma is used in 2 countries. The largest communities live in Myanmar (1.0 million) and Bangladesh (220,000).
Share of the population that speaks Marma: Myanmar 1.7% (1.0 million) and Bangladesh 0.1% (220,000).
Marma is not a national official language anywhere.
Writing system and status
Marma is written in the Bangla and Myanmar scripts. It is a safe, widely transmitted language: children still learn it at home as their first language.
Its closest relatives in the same branch of the family are Rakhine, Burmese and Sichuan Yi.
ISO codes: ISO 639-3 rmz.
Frequently asked questions about Marma
How many people speak Marma?
Where is Marma spoken?
What language family does Marma belong to?
What is Marma called in Marma?
Is Marma an endangered language?
Data: Languages of the World dataset (MIT) — ISO 639-3, Glottolog (CC BY 4.0), Unicode CLDR, Google LinguaMeta (CC BY 4.0) and Wikidata; country lists: samayo/country-json (MIT). Speaker numbers include first- and second-language speakers where sources report them.