Editing Endonym and exonym (section)

=== In East Asia ===
{{unreferenced section|date=October 2024}}
Although the pronunciation for several names of Chinese cities such as [[Beijing]] and [[Nanjing]] has not changed for quite some time while in [[Mandarin Chinese]] (although the [[prestige dialect]] shifted from [[Nanjing dialect]] to [[Beijing dialect]] during the 19th century), they were called [[Beijing|Peking]] and [[Nanjing|Nanking]] in English due to the older [[Chinese postal romanization]] convention, based largely on the [[Nanjing dialect]]. [[Pinyin]], based largely on the [[Beijing dialect]], became the official [[romanization]] method for [[Mandarin Chinese|Mandarin]] in the 1970s.

As the Mandarin pronunciation does not perfectly map to an [[English phoneme]], English speakers using either romanization will not pronounce the names correctly if standard English pronunciation is used. Nonetheless, many older English speakers still refer to the cities by their older English names, and even today they are often used in their traditional associations, such as [[Peking duck]], [[Peking opera]], and [[Peking University]]. As for Nanjing, the historical event called the [[Nanking Massacre]] (1937) uses the city's older name because that was the name of the city at the time of occurrence.

Likewise, many Korean cities like [[Busan]] and [[Incheon]] (formerly "Pusan" and "Inch'ŏn" respectively) also underwent changes in spelling due to changes in romanization, even though the Korean pronunciations have largely stayed the same.