Vietnamese exonyms


Below is a list of Vietnamese exonyms for various places around the world:

History

Historical exonyms include place names of bordering countries, namely Thailand, Laos, China, Champa and Cambodia.
During the expansion of Vietnam, some place names have become Vietnamized.

Sino-Vietnamese exonyms

Before modernity, sources of foreign place names in Vietnam are from documents that were mostly written in Classical Chinese. So many exonyms are directly from Chinese pronunciations. This in turn got transliterated into the Vietnamese, sinoxenic pronunciations of the Chinese characters. For example, Scotland is rendered as 苏格兰 in Chinese, this is pronounced as Sū-gé-lán in Mandarin Chinese, a somewhat faithful transcription of the original name. However, as applied to all Chinese characters, 苏格兰 can be transliterated into Vietnamese as Tô Cách Lan, which strays a bit further from the English and Scots name. This use has became archaic during recent times, and only some countries eg. Russia, the US, Australia, Russia, India and most European countries retain the Sino-Vietnamese pronunciations.

Exonyms from other languages

Place names familiar to Vietnamese people will often be respelled in a way that Vietnamese can pronounce it.
However, for places not commonly known among Vietnamese, or places spelled simply enough for Vietnamese to easily figure out how to pronounce, the English exonym or the romanization of the endonym is written without any changes to spelling.

Afghanistan

Albania

Algeria

Argentina

Australia

Austria

Bahrain

Belarus

Belgium

Brazil

Bulgaria

Cambodia

Canada

China

Cyprus

Czechia

Denmark

East Timor

Egypt

Eritrea

Estonia

Ethiopia

Finland

France

Georgia

Germany

Greece

Iceland

India

Indonesia

Iran

Iraq

Ireland

Israel

Italy

Japan

While some Japanese have Sino-Japanese names, others have native Japanese names, or a combination of both, the Vietnamese names for these cities are based on the Sino-Vietnamese pronunciations of the kanji used to write their names. However, using the endonym is far more common than the Vietnamese exonym.

Jordan

Kazakhstan

Laos

Latvia

Libya

Lithuania

Luxembourg

Malaysia

Moldova

Mongolia

Montenegro

Morocco

Mexico

Myanmar

Netherlands

New Zealand

North Korea

North Macedonia

Norway

Pakistan

Philippines

Poland

Qatar

Romania

Russia

Saudi Arabia

South Africa

South Korea

Spain

Sri Lanka

Sweden

Switzerland

Taiwan

Thailand

Tunisia

Turkey

Ukraine

United Kingdom

United States

Other