I am interested in learning the Shan language including reading and writing. I feel that after twenty years I have quite good enough Thai, and some Lanna dialect, but am in frequent contact with the Tai, Shan, TaiYai community here in Fang and would like to have a go at it.

Does anyone have any shan language text books for beginners which I could get scans or photocopies of....and also share them with a school for the kids of migrant workers here...?

That's funny, I had the exact same thought today. My wife and in-laws are Shan. But they never learned how to write it. I did a little googling at work and found a few things. It's a lot simpler than Thai to write. Here's what I found so far:

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/shan.htm

http://www.shaninform.org/Learning_Tai/tai_phonetic.php

Relatively few of the 6 million shan people are able to read and write the Shan language, and those still in Burma are forced to learn Burmese, so the Shan living in exile in Thailand are a community upholding their customs etc. Similar to the Tibetans in exile in a way.

The SEAlang Shan Dictionary and Bitext Corpus might be helpful. I don't know of any other resources off the top of my head.

Last year there was a Shan-Thai Dictionary published by Chiang Mai Rajabhat University. I think it would be a very useful book if you could get your hands on a copy.

Edited July 16, 201016 yr by LazyYogi

Go up past Thaton to Mok Cham, the largest Shan village in the area, and ask around. Perhaps one of the original settlers brought over some books that might be copied. Otherwise you might check at Payap as the missionaries often printed up basic introductions to many of the minority languages.

In case your interested, I think the Surawong Book Centre sells 2 or 3 different books that can be used to learn to read Shan from Thai. I bought them a few years back, and I'm sure they probably still sell them.

There's also a good selection of books on Shan/Thai Yai and Kam Muang/Northern Thai at Duangkamol Chiang Mai. Go upstairs and turn right; it's a small shelf right in front of you, before you get to the school textbooks.

I found somewhere to download the Padauk Unicode font that can be used to display the Shan variation of the Burmese script correctly HERE. There is also a keyboard layout for Mac users there specifically designed for typing in Tai.

You can also get the same Padauk font HERE.

From my very limited experience it is important to not set up your computer with any other Burmese fonts, because many of them don't follow the standard and it totally goofs up how it gets displayed on the screen. You can can pull up the Wikipedia article on the Shan as sort of a test to see it it is displaying correctly.

In the first sentence of the article , in parenthesis, you should see "tái" written in the Shan script, which matches the script right above the picture of the woman on the right.

Edited July 19, 201016 yr by LazyYogi

Is there an easy way for Windows XP users (for example) to upgrade to the right version of Uniscribe to get the Padauk font to render properly in non-graphite applications? I ended up having to install SIL's Fieldworks to get an apparently legitimate copy - and I may still have had to resort to being root on the Linux side of my dual boot PC to move usp10.dll to the right directories.

Edited July 24, 201015 yr by Richard W

I've just released an iPhone app for learning Shan. It's called "Speak Shan".

It is just for speaking, so it displays a phonetic spelling for each phrase.

It has audio of a native Shan speaker saying each phrase.

If anyone is interested you can check it out here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/speak-shan/id416312730?mt=8