The Dancing Backpacker

Mee-ann-mar. Me-er-mar. My-an-mar. Or Burma. These are just some of the ways I've heard this country identified. The story behind the Myanmar/Burma debate is that when the British colonized Myanmar, and discovered that the locals called themselves 'Burmese', they said "Hey, this must be Burma!" and thus Myanmar became Burma to the British and to all the other people that didn't want to bother with pronouncing Myanmar. Generally the locals tend to stick to the original name