Karenni, also known as Kayah, is spoken by the Karenni people of Kayah State in eastern Myanmar, close to the Thai border. It belongs to the Karenic branch of the Sino-Tibetan family, making it a relative of S'gaw and Pwo Karen, though the Karen languages are not all mutually intelligible. There are two main forms, Eastern and Western Kayah, and speaker numbers are modest, generally put in the low hundreds of thousands. Decades of conflict in Kayah State have driven many Karenni into refugee camps in Thailand, and from there communities have been resettled in the United States, Australia and elsewhere. Written traditions are recent and more than one script has been used, so many speakers are literate in Burmese or Thai rather than in Karenni itself.
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