And how much does it matter anymore?
“FOLLOW local practice when a country expressly changes its name,” advises “The Economist Style Book”, the Bible of this newspaper. Among the list of examples that follow (“Lviv, not Lvov” etc) only two rate authorial interjections: “Myanmar, not (alas) Burma” and “Yangon, not (alas, alack) Rangoon”. We follow that dictate in our pages, of course, but not everyone else does. Upon landing at the country’s busiest airport, your pilot may welcome you to Yangon, but your luggage will still be tagged RGN. Though Barack Obama referred to Myanmar when he met the country’s former president, Thein Sein, for the first time, the American embassy still gives its address as “Rangoon, Burma”. And ordinary Burmese tend to refer, at least in conversation, to their country as “Burma” and its capital as “Rangoon”. Which should you use, and why?
In 1989 the then-ruling military junta changed the name, one year after it brutally suppressed an uprising, and one year before Aung San Suu Kyi won a landslide electoral victory that the junta simply ignored. The junta claimed both that Burma was a colonially imposed name and, as this newspaper explained in 2013, that it “had an ethnic-supremacist tinge, since it referred to the ‘Burman’ majority”. The latter argument was bogus: for one thing, whatever ethnic supremacism was implied by the name paled in comparison to that expressed in the junta’s policies. For another, the names share a common root. Though the words look radically different in Roman scripts, in Burmese they are pronounced almost identically: with a quick, unstressed first syllable, either “buh” or something like “munn”, followed by a longer “MA”. In neither name is there a hard “r” sound anywhere. It is never pronounced “MAI-an-marr”. Gustaaf Houtman, an anthropologist who specialises in the country, explains that native speakers use both words: Myanmar is the formal, literary form and Burma an everyday term. Burma has the advantages of ease of pronunciation (for foreigners), and visual consistency: the adjectival form is Burmese, not Myanmarese (still less Myanmese, ugh!).
So which should be used? For years that depended on the speaker’s (or writer’s) politics. Miss Suu Kyi and those sympathetic to her cause conspicuously refused to call the country “Myanmar”, because doing so would lend legitimacy to the junta’s choice of nomenclature, and hence to the junta itself. So countries sympathetic to her cause, mainly in Europe and America, followed suit. But since taking office as an MP four years ago—and certainly since assuming leadership of her country last March—her objections to the new name have softened. In her first speech to the UN as her country’s leader, she mainly referred to it as “Myanmar”.
Your correspondent finds himself in the country every six weeks or so. In print he hews rigorously to the style book, and calls the country “Myanmar”. In conversation he uses both names, asystematically. Aside from the occasional white-bearded, hyper-punctilious European tourist, nobody has ever corrected him. The battle over the name stems from the days when Myanmar/Burma was more cause than country—when simply choosing to say “Burma” was a declaration of being on the right side of a fight for freedom and justice. Those days are over. The country’s problems today are far more complex: not how to convince an authoritarian regime to recognise popular will, but how to lift tens of millions out of desperate poverty as quickly as possible, and how to quell multiple decades-long civil wars and create a just, functional state whose writ extends across its entire territory. Those problems become no less thorny whichever name you use.
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