Why does Myanmar (Burma) have two names?

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This is the script for my video posted on June 19, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.

This Southeast Asian country has two names, and using either of them means that you are taking a side. Myanmar is the name most people use for it, but most maps also call it Burma in parentheses. This country is the site of one of the longest and most fragmented civil wars on the planet, and the fight over what to call it is really a part of that war itself. So why does Myanmar, or Burma, have two names, and what can this dynamic tell us about the country’s role in geopolitics?

To see why a single name can carry so much weight, we first have to look at some history. Around 1057 CE, the Pagan Kingdom unified the Irrawaddy valley for the first time. That unity did not last, but over the centuries it was rebuilt under a series of dynasties, and from the late 18th century into the early 19th, the last of them, the Konbaung, expanded westward into Arakan, Manipur, and Assam. This is what brought the Burmese Empire into contact with the British Empire for the first time, because it began encroaching on British Bengal. In 1824, Britain went to war with the Burmese Empire and took the city of Rangoon, forcing Burmese forces back and annexing the coastal regions of Arakan and Tenasserim. That first war was, on its own, the longest and most expensive war in the history of British India. A second war in 1852 handed Britain all of Lower Burma, including Rangoon and the rice-rich Irrawaddy delta. Then in 1885, a British force of about 10000 men captured Mandalay and annexed Upper Burma, exiling the royal family and formally taking control of the region as a province of British India.

From 1886 onward, the British exploited and transformed the Burmese economy, turning it into a massive agricultural center governed directly under British India. They ruled the place as two separate countries. The lowland core, the rice-producing Irrawaddy delta and the central plains where most of the population lived, was one part, while the highland rim home to many smaller ethnic groups was ruled through local chiefs. This persisted until the region gained a parliament and prime minister of its own in 1937. By the start of WWII, nearly half of Rangoon’s population was Indian thanks to the increased integration this allowed. In this period, the British leaned on different ethnicities for different things. Some were treated as martial races and recruited disproportionately by the military, and these notably excluded the Burman ethnic majority. There are differing opinions on whether the British intentionally created or simply reinforced ethnic divisions in the country, but regardless the result was a place with serious ethnic divisions.

During WWII, the Burma Independence Army, or BIA, was formed in Thailand with Japanese training, and these mostly ethnic Burman forces fought alongside the Japanese in their invasion of Burma. Many ethnic minorities remained loyal to Britain and fought back. Ethnic Burmans largely welcomed the Japanese initially, and they even willingly massacred minorities on their behalf. But by 1945, the army, renamed the Burma National Army two years earlier, had grown disillusioned with Japanese occupation, and that March it switched sides and aligned with the Allies. This period provoked longstanding distrust between the ethnic Burmans and smaller groups.

As the war ended, an interim government led by Aung San negotiated with delegates from many ethnic minority groups, promising full autonomy for the frontier areas, equal citizenship rights, equitable development funds, and a constitution that would give certain states the right to secede after 10 years. But in July 1947, months before independence, Aung San and six members of his cabinet were assassinated. Burma became independent in January 1948, and almost immediately insurgencies broke out across the country's ethnic and ideological lines, beginning one of the world's longest-running civil wars. Then in 1962, General Ne Win seized power, arresting the president and prime minister with the justification that this was the only way to stop the country from disintegrating as disparate ethnic states pushed for autonomy, and he established the country’s military junta that rules to this day.

The army has equated any kind of federalism with the death of the country ever since. But this means that smaller groups like the Muslim Rohingya of Rakhine state have faced intense discrimination. In 1982, most Rohingya were stripped of their citizenship on the claim that they were colonial-era migrants, even though Muslim communities had lived in the region long before the British arrived. In 2017, the military drove more than 740000 of them into Bangladesh in what the UN calls a mass atrocity. Fundamentally, these dynamics are the reason the country has two names today.

Both names, Burma and Myanmar, actually come from the same root. The Burmese language, as it’s called in academia, is a diglossic language, which means its formal written register is different from its more casual spoken one. In the written form the country’s name is Myanma, but spoken aloud it’s called Bama. The English transliteration of the spoken name gave us Burma. So these are not a colonial name and a native one, but rather the same native name expressed in two different ways. In June 1989, a year after the country’s army crushed a nationwide pro-democratic uprising, the ruling junta changed the official English name to Myanmar. Its argument was that Burma named only the majority ethnic group while Myanmar was more inclusive of the country’s other ethnicities, but in reality it’s an arbitrary distinction. Both names derive from the majority Burman group, and scholars widely reject the military's claim that Myanmar is the more inclusive of the two. The real reason for the change is that Burma, though it comes from the common spoken name Bama, was a colonial-era relic the junta viewed as a threat.

Nonetheless, the UN recognized the name change in 1989 along with many other countries, though the US and the UK historically continued using Burma to signal their rejection of the ruling junta’s legitimacy. US sanctions, for example, still only reference Burma, in part because changing course now would require previous laws to be revised. The official US stance in general is to say Burma but use Myanmar as a courtesy in certain communications, and Burmese is still the English-language demonym. In general, the name a particular country uses is a rough indicator of how soft its stance is on the junta.

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