| Summary/Abstract |
The State Law and Order Protection Council (SLORC)
decided in 1989 (as decreed in the Adaptation of Expressions Law) that their country, heretofore referred to as Burma, was henceforth to be referred to (in English) as Myanmar, that Rangoon would be called Yangon, and so forth. The name Myanmar is taken from the literary form of the language, while the term Burma is derived from the spoken form (in Bamar, the language of the dominant ethnic group). Although the Burmese-language name of the country has included "Myanmar" since independence in 1948, some organizations, including Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD), prefer the spoken form "Burma" (which was also in use during the independence movement prior to 1948) and still use it in English. Because the political renaming came in the wake of the 1988 coup, this has given rise to a division between nominalists (those who consider names a matter of arbitrary convenience) and realists (those who think names mean
something).
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