"During its 16th Session (New York, 1992), the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN) reconvened its working group to establish the official forms of country names. The new working group was given the task of updating a list of country names drawn up in 1986. This document is the successor to that first effort and has been compiled using Unicode-compliant fonts throughout. It contains entries for the 193 countries generally recognized by the international community to be independent states. It is current as of October 2007. All of the countries listed in this document are United Nations member states, with the exception of the Holy See, which has permanent observer status in the UN. The principal aim of this document is to present country names in the language or languages used in an official capacity within each country in the world. These names, presented in the National Official name section, are provided in two forms: the short names, which may or may not be official, are the ones in common use, while the formal names are those used in an official diplomatic context. The form of the article is provided where necessary to indicate gender. The authority for country names used officially in the United Nations is the UN Terminology Section, which maintains the United Nations Multilingual Terminology Database (or UNTERM), available on the Internet at http://unterm.un.org. This database contains records for each country that list, among other things, the short and formal country names in the six official languages of the UN. This information has been extracted from the UNTERM database and, with some minor modifications, is presented in the UN Official names section of this document. In this document, languages written in non-Roman scripts are presented in their native scripts whenever technically possible, and then these scripts are romanized according to systems approved by the United Nations (see the website of the UNGEGN Working Group on Romanization Systems at http://www.eki.ee/wgrs/ for the latest Report on the Current Status of United Nations Romanization Systems for Geographical Names). These languages include Amharic, Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Khmer, Macedonian Cyrillic, Nepali, Persian, Russian, Serbian, Tamil, Thai, and Urdu. For those languages without a UN-approved romanization system, the most widely used international system is applied and its name listed in the Notes section of the ..."
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