The Sgaw Karen language
ကညီကျိာ် · K'nyaw · ISO ksw
What is Sgaw Karen?
Sgaw Karen is the name of a language. The people who speak it call it K'nyaw. Many people just call it “Karen.” It is part of a big family of languages from Asia. About 2.2 million people speak it. Most of them live in Myanmar. About 200,000 more speak it in the north and west of Thailand. Smaller groups live on some islands in India. And more and more people take the language with them to other countries.
How it is written
Sgaw Karen is written in its own letters. These letters grew out of the letters used for the Mon and Burmese languages. There are 25 consonants, 9 vowels, 5 tone marks, and 5 medials. You read it from left to right. Long ago people wrote with no spaces between words. Today people often put a small space after each part. Some groups in north Thailand also write it with the same letters we use for English. There is a Karen Braille too, the kind of letters you read with your fingers.
A tone language
Every Sgaw Karen sound can be said in a few tones, about five or six. It depends on where you are. The tone changes the meaning. This is why Knyaw helps you read and understand words, not say them out loud. You can only learn tone in an honest way with sound and a Karen speaker. A website can't take their place.
A short story of the language
The letters we use today were made in the 1830s. A man named Jonathan Wade, who came to teach about his church, changed the Mon and Burmese letters to fit Sgaw Karen. A man named Francis Mason helped put the whole Bible into Sgaw Karen for the first time. It was done in 1853. A small newspaper called The Morning Star began in 1842. These teachers also made the first books about how the language works and the first word books. Over time, Sgaw Karen became the main language of Kayin State.
A little about how it works
In Sgaw Karen, most short sounds can stand on their own as words. A Karen sentence often goes like this: who does it, then the action, then the thing. So you might say “I eat rice” the way we do. A word for a thing stays the same whether there is one or many. To count things, you add a small helper word, like “three cups of water.” Many languages near it work this way too.
Learn to read it
Knyaw is a free home for reading Sgaw Karen, made by the community: the letters, the words, and the meaning. Start with a few words and grow from there.
Facts on this page come from Wikipedia's “S'gaw Karen language” page, which you can use under CC BY-SA, together with Knyaw's own digging.