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News Forum - Burma or Myanmar? Myanmarese or Burmese?


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We refer to Myanmar a lot in our news because it’s a bordering foreign country to Thailand and many people from Myanmar work in and around Thailand. It’s also subject of an ongoing coup after the Burmese military staged a coup on February 1, 2021. But is it Myanmar or Burma? And are the people that live there Myanmarese or Burmese? As you’ll read across the media there is no precise answer to the question with foreign powers still referring to the country with both names. The official English name was changed by the country’s ruling government from the “Union […]

The story Burma or Myanmar? Myanmarese or Burmese? as seen on Thaiger News.

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Ask the people. And afaik and experienced, most of them call themselves Burmese, speaking Burmese, even coming from Burma, not from Myanmar. Myanmar is p.c., Burma is still the roads real usage

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Reading ‘a man from Myanmar’ is a lot more cumbersome than ‘a Burmese man’

Myanmarese also seems cumbersome. Myan would be the simplest, but I guess that would be confused with Mayan.

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All the names are just an iteration of Bamar - the original inhabitant of current day Myanmar. The Thais call them Phama, the British colonialists call them Burma and the nationalists in an attempt to discard any remnants of colonialism settled on another iteration called Myanmar

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i asked a local guy that i used to work with about this as i noticed aunty beeb had a habit of still using what i considered an abriviated version of the old colonial name when referring to the country from time to time. 

he said burma was the english language name of his country and myanmar was the myanmarese language name of his country.

kipling's "mandalay" would fail in the first line nowadays!

Edited by Cathat
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