Recently I watched a video on YouTube of Merle Haggard and Tammy Wynette performing “live”, sad pun, at Wembley Stadium in London in 1988.
This got me to thinking.
What is country music called in other parts of the world? Don’t they have their own country music? Is what I know as country music called American country music elsewhere? Is this American country music popular elsewhere? Wembley Stadium was sold out for this concert in 1988.
One cool way you can answer these types of questions is to enter something into Wikipedia, and then clicking at the non-English Wikipages shown at bottom left. After entering “country music” into Wikkipedia, I checked out the article’s title in some other languages:
French: Musique country
Finnish: Countrymusiikki or kantri
Serbo-Croatian: Country glazba
Estonian: Kantrimuusika
Russian: Кантри (Kantri)
Hungarian: Countryzene
Vietnamese: Nhạc đồng quê (IIUC, Nhạc = “music”)
Turkish: Country
Czech: Country
Italian: Country
Spanish: Música country
Bahasa Indonesian: Musik country
German: Country-Musik
Dutch: Countrymuziek
Swedish: Countrymusik
Swahili: Muziki wa country
Romanian: Muzică country
Polish: Muzyka country
Here are some in scripts that I can’t read. I’m betting that all of these but the Chinese version are based on the English word “country”:
Arabic: موسيقى الريف
Farsi: موسیقی کانتری
Hebrew: קאנטרי
Chinese: 乡村音乐
Korean: 컨트리 뮤직
Japanese: カントリー・ミュージック
Thai: คันทรี (แนวดนตรี)
Japanese is kantorii myuujikku or country music.
If true, that’s so… odd. Why would Chinese be different in this regard?
(FWIW, the characters do mean “country music”, but they’re not based on English.)
Chinese doesn’t seem to adapt English words as readily as Japanese, say. A lot of times, Chinese speakers will just translate a concept using native Chinese words (cf. German Fernsprecher for “telephone”). That’s not 100%, I don’t believe, but it’s a lot more common.
What I meant was that I expected some or all of the Hebrew, Arabic, Korean, Thai, etc. characters to be pronounced something like kahn-tree or similar. I could be wrong, and those languages might well do something like the Fernsprecher example above.
The Arabic says “musicee al reef” which is literally “country music”
Sure enough, I took that Chinese name for “country music” ( 乡村音乐 ) to an online translator. Here are the results:
乡村 (xiang cun) = rustic, village (connotation of “rural” in this context)
音乐 (yin yùe) = music
In India it is also called country music.
Local “country” or “folk” music has its own names, e.g. ghazals, which is not really the equivalent of american country music, but is our version of pain-filled lyrics about love, life and liquor. No trucks though 
In Thailand, it’s called luk thung, literally “children of the fields.” Specific to the Northeast, historically the poorest region of Thailand.
“Luk Thung songs typically reflect the hardship of everyday life among the rural poor. Tempos tend to be slow, and singers use an expressive singing style with a lot of vibrato. Comparisons are sometimes made with country music of the United States.”
Country music is an outgrowth of English-language folk music as traditionally performed in the United States. The United States is a big and diverse country: you could say the same of the Blues or Hip-Hop or any number of other styles with traditional roots. Other countries also have industries that originated in their own folk music. Ethnocentrically, we call them “World Music” while we call our own by their specific genre names. If you’re really into a particular country’s music, you might be more specific; they certainly would be. Because we have a giant recording industry and export entertainment, our genres are more familiar on the world scene that other people’s, though, and they’re more likely to know about country and make (say) Indian country songs than we are to make an American ghazal.
Moved to CS.
I will relate a couple of country music experiences I had in Europe:
One was in Spain, where, as we were driving into Ávila late at night, we happened across a Spanish radio station that was paying tribute to “the great Conway Twitty” with an hour-long block of his songs.
In Kutná Hora in the Czech Republic, my girlfriend and I came across a beer garden called (IIRC) Nashville or Club Nashville, or something like that. Anyway, Nashville was in the name of the place. Inside, they were playing what seemed to be home-grown Czech-language country music. All twangy and slow, but no tunes I recognized, and all in Czech.
Also in the Czech Republic, I was walking through a public building, and happened to walk past a hall where a wedding ceremony was being held. The song that was being played was Tex Ritter’s Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling.
And this site claims that (true to what I saw and heard) country music is very popular in the Czech Republic.
I’d say country music is pretty popular as a small niche in the UK. I grew up listening to Buck Owens and George Jones in Liverpool, England, just because my Dad was a huge country fan. I’d imagine there’s enclaves of hardcore country fans throughout Europe, it’s a popoular sound for the common man after all.
There doesn’t seem to be the huge cross-over stars around at the moment, though, that would put country in the mainstream overseas. You mentioned Tammy Wynette, Merle Haggard - along with similar sized stars like Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson etc they really had that broad appeal. The modern big country stars that most people have heard of, say Shania Twain or Garth Brooks, don’t seem to have the same quality. Is there a big, crossover country star around at the moment who’s actually any good?
Alas, country music isn’t really country music anymore. These days, Nashville is producing pop music dressed up to look like country. The only Nashville act I find palatable these days is Brad Paisley, and even he has that Nashville pop sound.
There are a few authentic country performers around, but these days you find them under the heading “alt.country” and they don’t tend to get airtime on mainstream country stations.
The best true-to-its-roots country music of the past two decades has been produced by Dwight Yoakam.
There is a certain irony in that Shania Twain is actually Canadian, not American, yet she’s made a name in a very America form of music.
And I think you’re doing a disservice to some of the modern performers - the big stars you name saying they have wide appeal only achieved that over a span of decades, and that reputation was built on their best/most successful recordings, not the vastly larger amount of mediocre or worse that they produced, particularly in their early years. Likewise, some current performers might, decades from now, have “broad appeal” based on a selection of their repertoire and many years of performing.
When I go to foreign websites, like Russia, Romania, China, Japan, I find country music listed at “Bluegrass”
Well, sure, Dwight is great, but let’s not forget Emmylou Harris and Robbie Fulks and Junior Brown (OK, he’s a bit of a novelty act, but if we’re going to mention guitar heroes, let’s not omit Dwight’s guitar player Pete Anderson, whose solo stuff is pretty good too) and (for a while) the Mavericks, and Jimmy Dale Gilmore and Alejandro Escovedo and BR549 and Rose Flores and Buddy and Julie Miller (together and on their own) and about a zillion more. Sure, Dwight has probably sold more records than any of them except maybe Emmylou, but he’s not out there doing it alone.
All good. None as good as Yoakam. 
“Do you like country music? Here’s a song from the country of Ukraine.”
Peter Ostroushko