Tavoyan dialects

The Tavoyan or Dawei dialect of Burmese (MY ထားဝယ်စကား) is spoken in Dawei (Tavoy), in the coastal Tanintharyi Region of southern Myanmar (Burma).

Tavoyan retains an medial that has since merged into the  medial in standard Burmese and can form the following consonant clusters:, , , , , , ,. Examples include MY မ္လေ ( → Standard Burmese ) for "ground" and MY က္လောင်း ( → Standard Burmese ) for "school". Also, voicing can only occur with unaspirated consonants in Tavoyan, whereas in standard Burmese, voicing can occur with both aspirated and unaspirated consonants. Also, there are many loan words from Malay and Thai not found in Standard Burmese. An example is the word for goat, which is hseit (MY ဆိတ်) in Standard Burmese but bê (MY ဘဲ့) in Tavoyan, most likely from Mon  or Thai  (แพะ).

In the Tavoyan dialect, terms of endearment, as well as family terms, are considerably different from Standard Burmese. For instance, the terms for "father" and "mother" are MY ဖစု and MY မိစု  respectively. Moreover, the honorific MY နောင် (Naung) is used in lieu of MY မောင် (Maung) for young males.

Rhymes
The following is a list of rhyme correspondences unique to the Tavoyan dialect

History
According to Michael Aung-Thwin, the Burmese dialect of Dawei/Tavoy preserved the "spelling (and presumably pronunciation)" of the Old Burmese from the Bagan era. As a result, he suggests that it diverged from other Burmese varieties sometime after the Burmese settlement of Lower Burma under the Bagan era, between the 11th and 13th centuries. He attributes this divergence to a migration of Mon speakers into the area north of Dawei in the late 13th century, which would have cut off Dawei from the main Burmese area.