metadata

license: cc-by-nc-sa-4.0
language:
  - en
  - my
pretty_name: Myanmar Bilingual Placename Dictionary (48k+ Unique Entries)
tags:
  - myanmar
  - bilingual
  - dictionary
  - gazetteer
  - toponyms
  - named-entity-recognition
  - translation

Myanmar Bilingual Placename Dictionary (48k+ Unique Entries)

Dataset Description

This dataset provides a comprehensive, bilingual (English and Myanmar) dictionary of over 48,000 unique placenames from across Myanmar. It includes names for villages, village tracts, townships, districts, and states/regions, with each Myanmar name precisely mapped to its English equivalent.

This dataset is a derivative of the Myanmar Bilingual Village Address Directory and serves as a clean, de-duplicated key-value gazetteer. It is ideal for building dictionaries, training NER models, and as a lookup table for translation or data normalization tasks.

This final, cleaned dataset was prepared by freococo.

Data Fields

The dataset contains a single CSV file (myanmar_unique_placenames.csv) with two columns:

Myanmar_Name: The unique placename in Myanmar script.
English_Name: The corresponding English transliteration.

Example Row:

Myanmar_Name	English_Name
`ကဿပေါင်း`	`Kat Tha Paung`
`ရန်ကုန်`	`Yangon`

Dataset Creation

This dataset was derived from the Myanmar Place Codes (P-Codes) Release 9.6 (Feb 2025), provided by the Myanmar Information Management Unit (MIMU), a service of the United Nations in Myanmar. The source data was downloaded from the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX).

The creation process involved several steps:

Generating a full, bilingual address string for every rural village.
Parsing each address component from both the English and Myanmar strings.
Cleaning and stripping administrative classifiers (e.g., "Township", "မြို့နယ်").
Pairing the corresponding English and Myanmar names and storing only the unique pairs.
Sorting the final dictionary by the Myanmar alphabet (က-အ) for intuitive use.

Usage

The dataset can be easily loaded using the Hugging Face datasets library.

from datasets import load_dataset

# Load the dataset
dataset = load_dataset("freococo/myanmar_unique_placenames")

# Access the full dataset (it has only one 'train' split)
placename_dictionary = dataset['train']

# Example: Find the English name for a Myanmar place
for place in placename_dictionary:
    if place['Myanmar_Name'] == 'တွံတေး':
        print(f"The English name for 'တွံတေး' is '{place['English_Name']}'.")
        # Expected output: The English name for 'တွံတေး' is 'Twantay'.
        break

Use Cases and Limitations

Potential Use Cases

NER Model Training: An ideal resource for building a dictionary-based NER model or for fine-tuning language models to recognize Myanmar toponyms (GPE - Geopolitical-Entity).
Translation and Transliteration: Serves as a high-quality parallel corpus for training models to translate or transliterate placenames between Myanmar script and English.
Gazetteer for Geocoding: Can be used as a lookup dictionary (gazetteer) in a larger geocoding or address-parsing system.
Data Cleaning: Useful for standardizing messy or inconsistently spelled placenames in other datasets.

Limitations

No Hierarchy or Context: This is a "flat" dictionary. It does not contain information about whether a name refers to a village, township, or district. For hierarchical data, refer to the original source files or the parent Myanmar Bilingual Village Address Directory dataset.
No Geographic Coordinates: The final dictionary does not contain latitude and longitude data.
Static Data: The dataset is based on the February 2025 release from MIMU and will not reflect any subsequent administrative changes.

Citation Information

If you use this dataset in your work, please cite the original data source and acknowledge the creator of this specific version.

Citing the Original Source

Myanmar Information Management Unit (MIMU). (2025). MIMU Place Codes (P-Codes) Release 9.6. Sourced from the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX).

Citing this Dataset Repository

@dataset{freococo_myanmar_unique_placenames,
  author = {freococo},
  title = {Myanmar Bilingual Placename Dictionary (48k+ Unique Entries)},
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  version = {1.0.0},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/freococo/myanmar_unique_placenames}
}