[tz] Rangoon to Yangon

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Thu Sep 8 18:16:41 UTC 2016


On 09/07/2016 07:09 PM, David Massoud wrote:
> Myanmar's former capital and most populous city is currently known as 
> Yangon.

When the Asia/Rangoon entry was created in 1993, "Rangoon" was by far 
the most common name in English. Nowadays, my Google web searches yield 
about 31 million hits for "Yangon" and about 10 million for "Rangoon", 
and my Google News searches yield about 220 thousand for "Yangon" and 
about 74 thousand for "Rangoon". Bing searches are also lopsided, though 
not quite by the same margin (7.4 millon for "Yangon", 3.0 million for 
"Rangoon"). Although Google Book searches for 21st-century books yield 
only 20 web pages' worth of hits for "Yangon" vs 25 pages for "Rangoon", 
the discrepancy seems to be due mostly to history books.

These popularity measure should be taken with a grain of salt, and we 
wouldn't change merely if it were now a horse race. That being said, it 
does seem now like Yangon is now by far the predominant name in English 
and that it's time to change the tz zone name. Proposed patch attached.

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