Myanmar or Burma?

[kerouac2]

I have noticed that in many recent articles, the name Burma is being used again.  Even on the Johns Hopkins coronovirus tracker, the country is called Burma.  In French articles, the name is almost always Birmanie instead of Myanmar these days.

I have not found any reason for this in the news although I was expecting to see that someone like Aung San Suu Kyi had decided to use the old name or something.  Has anybody seen anything about this?

[bjd]

That might be a kind of indirect political support for Aung San Suu Kyi. I remember when the military renamed the country Myanmar, it was said that it was the country's original name, before the Brits colonized it.

This is from Wikipedia:The name of the country has been a matter of dispute and disagreement, particularly in the early 21st century, focusing mainly on the political legitimacy of those using Myanmar versus Burma. Both names derive from the earlier Burmese Myanma or Myamma, an ethnonym for the majority Bamar ethnic group, of uncertain etymology. The terms are also popularly thought to derive from Brahma Desha or ब्रह्मादेश/ब्रह्मावर्त (Sanskrit) after Brahma.

In 1989, the military government officially changed the English translations of many names dating back to Burma's colonial period or earlier, including that of the country itself: Burma became Myanmar. The renaming remains a contested issue.[22] Many political and ethnic opposition groups and countries continue to use Burma because they do not recognise the legitimacy of the ruling military government or its authority to rename the country.

[fumobici]

As is usual for them, the Italians just continued with the same name—Birmania—taking the long view and properly ignoring the silly fad pseudonym du jour.

It should take a century cooling off period at minimum before any major place can be renamed.

[questa]

Not to forget that both forms of the name ignore the fact that there are several other language groups

The main ethnic groups living in the seven ethnic minority states of Burma are the Karen, Shan, Mon, Chin, Kachin, Rakhine and Karenni. Other main groups include the Nagas, who live in north Burma and are estimated to number more than 100,000, constituting another complex family of Tibetan-Burmese language subgroups.
I prefer the old colonial names simply because I associate them with the poetry and romance of the country.

Same with Saigon in Vietnam. The official name became Ho Chi Minh, then the tourism people recognised that the name "Saigon" had value. They changed to HCM City for the CBD and the older areas are called Saigon.