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 (see: Chinese exonyms). This in turn got transliterated into the Vietnamese, sinoxenic pronunciations of the Chinese characters (also called Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation). 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.

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.