Theingi Thann In Myanmar, the digital revolution accelerated rapidly in the 2010s, as political and economic reforms ended decades of isolation. With affordable phones and SIM cards, internet access spread quickly, and social media reached millions of new users. Unicode did not fully support Burmese at the time, so locally developed Zawgyi became what most people relied on. It enabled communication, but at the cost of incompatibility, exclusion, and a fractured digital ecosystem.
Growing up during this shift, where Facebook functioned as Myanmar’s community forum, search engine, and news source, I experienced these gaps directly. Without the right software, entire feeds appeared as blank boxes. Friends typed in “Myanglish,” bending Burmese into the Latin alphabet, while young people helped their parents install font converters just to make text legible. The transition from Zawgyi to Unicode promised a standardized approach but raised new questions. What happens to millions of posts and memories written in Zawgyi? Could they be preserved, or would they be lost in an obsolete system? If the majority language faced such uncertainty, what of minority scripts—Shan, Karen, Mon, Chin, and others—that were never encoded at all? Their absence is part of the same story: decisions in type design affect not only how languages function technically, but also how memory and belonging are shaped by whose voices remain visible, and whose disappear.
These questions deepened as I connected with other Burmese type designers through the KBI Incubator at SILICON. Together we share resources and discuss challenges such as digitally typesetting stacked Burmese characters and advocating for ethnic language support. With Myanmar cut off from global forums by travel restrictions and political instability, rare opportunities to present internationally matter greatly. They ensure our stories are carried forward, and every act of using and preserving our language becomes a quiet form of reclamation.