Karen refers not to one language but to a group of Sino-Tibetan languages spoken by Karen peoples in south-eastern Myanmar, especially Kayin State, and across the border in western Thailand. S'gaw Karen and Pwo Karen are the largest, with Pa'o and Karenni, also called Kayah, among the other members; the varieties are not all mutually intelligible. Taken together the Karen languages have several million speakers. They are tonal, and unusually for Sino-Tibetan languages they follow subject-verb-object word order. S'gaw Karen is written in a script adapted from Burmese in the nineteenth century. Decades of conflict in Myanmar have created large Karen refugee communities in Thailand, and resettlement programmes have brought Karen speakers, particularly S'gaw speakers, to the United States, Australia and the UK.
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