Berlean has two different distinct orthographies, the classical orthography and the modern orthography. The classical orthography is passed down from Old Berlean and is closer in resemblance to the related Burmese alphabet. The modern orthography is the result of spelling reforms during the Epistemic Revolution in the early 20th century. The spelling reforms saw the loss of many redundant consonants and the development of a more phonetic system of writing. The revisionists also tried to make the letters appear more systematic: fricative consonants have two bodies and stop consonants only have one body; voiceless consonants tend to have an ‘eye’ and voiced consonants do not; and velars point downwards, palatals and dentals point sideways, and labials point upwards. The modern orthography is much more widely used nowadays than classical orthography, but both are taught in schools. The classical orthography is primarily reserved for literature or formal documents; however, literature published using the modern orthography is becoming much more prevalent and widely accepted. Both systems are abugidas in which a consonant has an inherent vowel (in both systems, the inherent vowel is /ɚ/); the vowel can be changed by other letters or diacritics that are placed around the consonant.
Modern Orthography
ဂြမေိင စီမဇဥ
Glmurn Sirmzr
*All voiced consonants (ဂ, ဇ, ဒ, ပ) and င take the alternative medial-A long form ါ
Classical Orthography
ကွမူန စိငဇါ (ခေိမေိင စီမဇဥ)
Kurmurn Sirmzr
Berlean Romanization
ပရီင ရိမာဇဥ
Brlien Luomarz
Consonants
| Labial | Coronal | Dorsal | |||
| Nasal | voiced | m /m/ | n /n/ | ||
| voiceless | mh /m̥/ | nh /n̥/ | |||
| Stop | voiced | b /b/ | d* /l/ | g /g/ | |
| voiceless | p /p/ | t /t/ | k /k/ | ||
| Fricative | voiced | v /v/ | dh /ð/ | z /z/ | gh /ɣ/ |
| voiceless | f /f/ | th /θ/ | s /s/ | kh /x/ | |
| Approximant | voiced | l /l/ | |||
| voiceless | lh /l̥/ | ||||
Lexicographic order: b d f g gh k kh l lh m mh n nh p s t v z
Vowels
| Medial | |||||
| ∅ | /j/ | /w/ | |||
| Vowel | /a/ | [a] a -a | [aɚ] ar -ar | [je] ye -ie | [wo] wo -uo |
| /ɚ/ | [ɚ] r -r | [jɪɚ̯] yir -ir | [wʊɚ̯] wur -ur |
||