Why do countries change their name?
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By Eric WeinerFeatures correspondent
With Turkey now officially Türkiye and rumours that India might soon go by the new name of Bharat, we ask: what’s in a name change, and why does it even matter?
That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet, William Shakespeare famously said. The bard of Stratford was wrong. Names matter. Trust me. My surname is the source of both pride and chagrin.
So, too, are many place names. But what you don’t like, you can change. Governments around the world have recently renamed hundreds of cities, towns, streets, mountains and national parks, with more in the works. Places change names for a variety of reasons: to erase a disgraced leader or honour a new one; to signal a fresh start or right past wrongs. These changes, though, are always unsettling, and often controversial.
In some cases, entire nations are changing names. Last year, Turkey officially became Türkiye. The name change was prompted, at least in part, because President Recep Tayyip Erdogan supposedly disliked his country’s association with the bird by the same name. In 2018, the African nation of Swaziland celebrated 50 years of independence from Britain by changing its name to Eswatini, or “land of the Swazi people” in the Swazi language.
When it comes to name changes, though, the world’s most populous nation, India, stands out. In the past few decades, it has replaced colonial and Muslim names with Hindu ones. Among the changes: Madras became Chennai; Calcutta, Kolkata; Bangalore, Bengaluru; and Allahabad, Prayagraj. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently hinted the entire country might soon go by a new name: Bharat, the Sanskrit and Hindi name for India. At a recent G20 meeting in New Delhi, Modi sat behind a nameplate that read “Bharat” and invited visiting dignitaries to a banquet hosted by the “President of Bharat”.
Modi’s trial balloon hasn’t flown very far yet. No wonder. Changing the official name of a nation isn’t easy, or cheap. A country must send official notice to the United Nations and advise how to write the new name in the international body’s six official languages. Once approved, UN officials register the new name in the database of World Geographical Names. Signs, military uniforms, official currency, government letterhead – and more – must also be changed.
The pace of name changes may have accelerated, but it is not a new phenomenon. Places have been changing names for as long as there have been places and names. Before the 5th Century, Paris was known as Lutetia, a holdover from Roman times. Before 1665, New York was New Amsterdam. For a while, from 1793 to 1834, Toronto was known as York. Before 1868, Tokyo was called Edo. And, in what is arguably history’s most famous name change, in 1930 Constantinople became Istanbul, inspiring Turkish pride as well as a hit song: Istanbul (Not Constantinople).
But why do place names matter? For newly independent nations hoping to distance themselves from a painful colonial past, a name change is typically the first order of business. When the British colony known as the Gold Coast gained independence in 1957, it immediately changed its name to Ghana. As decolonisation accelerated, the 1970s and ’80s witnessed a flurry of name changes, from Ceylon changing its name to Sri Lanka (1972) to Upper Volta becoming Burkina Faso (1984).
And while some name changes are dramatic, others are deceptively subtle. In 2018, Macedonia changed its name to North Macedonia. It might seem like a small, nearly insignificant change, but it is not. The modification ended a decades-long dispute with Greece, which has a region by the same name, and paved the way for North Macedonia to join NATO.
Few Macedonians, though, use the new name, and that raises a philosophical question: if a country changes its name but no one utters it, was it really changed? Many Vietnamese still refer to Ho Chi Minh City as Saigon, and many Indians still call Mumbai Bombay. Writer Leeya Mehta is among them. “For me and my generation, we really pushed back against the name change,” she said. “It made no sense.” When she says she’s from Bombay, inevitably, a well-intentioned foreigner replies, “Don’t you mean Mumbai?” Indians, though, never “correct” her, she said. The city itself seems conflicted about its identity: to this day Mumbai is home to the Bombay Stock Exchange and the Bombay High Court.
Or consider the case of Czechia. That is the new name for the Czech Republic, adopted in 2016. It is snappier and more evocative, some Czech officials believed. “It is not good if a country does not have clearly defined symbols or if it even does not clearly say what its name is,” the foreign minister at the time, Lubomír Zaorálek, told the Czech News Agency. But some Czechs worried the new name was too similar to the Russian region of Chechnya. “I don’t know who came with such a stupid idea,” former prime minister Andrej Babiš told the Wall Street Journal in 2020.
It’s not surprising we find these changes so unsettling. Place names provide what the Germans call Heimatsgefühl, a sense of belonging and attachment to one’s native land, and any threat to those attachments unnerves us. “Deliberately changing a historical place name is a dramatic act which is highly likely to lead to controversy and disagreement,” wrote anthropologist Thomas Eriksen in the JournalOsla.
Place names are, for better or worse, yoked to history. For nearly four centuries, the US state of Rhode Island was officially known as the “State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations”. In 2020, residents voted to change the name to simply Rhode Island. The old name, said state Senator Harold Metts, “carries a horrific connotation when considering the tragic and racist history of our nation”. The US Department of the Interior recently established the Derogatory Geographic Names Task Force. It is renaming hundreds of lakes, streams and mountain peaks that contain words such as “squaw”, a derogatory term for female Native Americans. In New Zealand, there have been calls to officially change the country’s name to Aotearoa, or “long white cloud” in Māori.
Some places don’t change their names so much as expand them. The stunning sandstone formation in central Australia was previously known as Ayers Rock, but now is officially named Uluru/Ayers Rock to reflect its spiritual importance to Aboriginal people.
Sometimes places change their names for more transactional reasons. In 1999, at the height of the dot-com bubble, the town of Halfway, Oregon, officially changed its name to Half.com, named after an e-commerce startup. (The experiment lasted only one year.) In 2011, the Australian town of Speed briefly changed its name to SpeedKills to raise awareness of road safety.
Old names have a way of boomeranging. After a fire destroyed much of Oslo in 1624, King Christian IV insisted the newly rebuilt city be named Christiana (later Kristiana) in his honour. No one, except the king, seemed to like the new name, and in 1925 Oslo became Oslo again. In 1914, at the start of World War One, the Russian city of St Petersburg became Petrograd. Then, in 1924, it was briefly renamed Leningrad in honour of Vladimir Lenin, before returning to its original name in 1991.
When it comes to nominative dexterity, though, Kazakhstan has them all beat. The Central Asian nation’s capital has changed names five times in the past six decades. In 1961, Akmolinsk, a Russian military outpost, became Tselinograd, which then became Akmola and then, in 1998, Astana (literally: “Capital”). A decade later the city was renamed Nur-Sultan, in honour of outgoing president Nursultan Nazarbayev – but in 2019 it reverted to Astana.
My spell-checker can barely keep up with the dizzying pace of name changes. While writing this article, it alerted me to several “sensitive geopolitical references”, implying I was committing a faux pas and underscoring the fact that we live in geographically fluid times. World maps should be written in pencil, not pen.
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