Korean exonyms

Korean exonyms are placenames of non-Korean places in the Korean language. As Korean had been heavily influenced by the Chinese language,[1] since Classical Chinese was the official language in the Korean imperial court, and as the Korean Peninsula was part of the East Asian cultural sphere, many exonyms are Sino-Korean names, such as the United States' exonym, Miguk (미국), which is the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese name for the United States, Měiguó (美國).[2] These placenames were commonplace before the division of Korea.

However, since the division of Korea, and as South Korea was establishing international relations outside of Asia, Korean placenames of foreign places, particularly endonyms of non-Chinese origin, began to approximate the English pronunciation or the indigenous pronunciation. Nonetheless, many placenames that have Sino-Korean pronunciations now have variant placenames that approximate the indigenous name, and in many cases such transcriptions have become more common than the Sino-Korean names. For example, Beijing can be called by its Sino-Korean name, Buk-gyŏng (북경, 北京), or it can be referred to by the transcription of the city's name based on the Mandarin pronunciation, Beijing (베이징).[3]

As regular communication between the citizens of North Korea and South Korea are rare due to the division of Korea and the Korean War establishing a hostile relationship between the two countries, telecommunications in North Korea being monitored and restricted to an extreme level and enforced with severe consequences, North Korean citizens largely being denied freedom of movement to other countries, and North Korea borrowing loanwords from Russian while South Korea borrowing words from English, this has resulted in significant differences between northern and southern dialects, sometimes to the point of mutual unintelligibility. In some cases, there may be different exonyms given to the same places in the different dialects.

As the Seoul dialect is the most commonly used dialect of Korean both domestically and internationally, the majority of the exonyms in this page are based on the Seoul dialect.