Bhutan in other languages: exonyms, Thimphu, ISO and 20 districts

Druk Yul, the land of the thunder dragon

Bhutan calls itself འབྲུག་ཡུལ།, transliterated 'Brug.yul and usually written Druk Yul, a name in use since the 17th century. It means the country of the Drukpa lineage, the school of Buddhism that shaped the state, and is often rendered the Land of the Thunder Dragon, since འབྲུག, 'brug, is the thunder dragon. The kingdom is འབྲུག་རྒྱལ་ཁབ།, 'Brug.rGyal.kʰab. Where the English word Bhutan comes from is uncertain; the likeliest source is Böd, the Tibetan name for Tibet.

Abroad, the country goes by Bhutan, and the h decides the spelling. Indic scripts have an aspirated bʰ and use it: Hindi भूटान (Bʰūṭān), Bengali ভূটান, Western Punjabi and Urdu بھوٹان. Most Cyrillic, Turkic and Arabic-script languages drop the h, as Russian Бутан and Arabic بوتان (Būtān) do; Georgian keeps both, ბუტანი and, with the h, ბჰუტანი. Tibetan alone uses the native name, written འབྲུག་ཡུལ། or འབྲག་ཡུལ།.

Thimphu is ཐིམ་ཕུ། in Dzongkha. The aspirated th is kept in Russian Тхимпху (Tȟimpȟu) and Belarusian Тхімпху, while Mongolian follows Russian and Korean and Chinese go their own way with 팀부 and 廷布 (Tíngbù).

Reading Dzongkha names

Dzongkha is written in the Tibetan script, from left to right, with a dot, the tsheg, between syllables. The transliteration on this page keeps that structure: each dot stands for a tsheg, and capitals mark the root letter of a syllable that begins with an unpronounced prefix, as in bSam.rʦe for Samtse or dBaṅ.'dus.pʰo.braṅ for Wangdue Phodrang. That is why the written forms look so far from the spoken names.

The district list has kept its 20 units. ISO 3166-2:BT has changed three English spellings since 2016: Ha became Haa and Samdrup Jongkha Samdrup Jongkhar in 2016, and Pemagatshel became Pema Gatshel in 2020. The table writes Trashigang བཀྲིས་སྒང, a contracted spelling of བཀྲ་ཤིས་སྒང, and names Trashi Yangtse after its centre, གཡང་རྩེ, without the Trashi of the English name. For Zhemgang it has གཞལམ་སྒང, where the Dzongkha column of Wikipedia's ISO 3166-2:BT reads གཞམས་སྒང.