The United Nations is to intervene to avoid international confusion over the names of countries, cities, hills and rivers which have been changing so frequently that postal services, search and rescue workers, tourists and public transport companies are struggling to cope.
Two manuals on how to standardise names across the world are being published next year so that in an increasingly globalised world it is possible to find people and places.
The most high-profile examples of the need for the science of place names — or toponymy — are the change of Bombay to Mumbai and Peking to Beijing (in Chinese, the Capital of the North), both reverting to the correct name from a pre-colonial era.
But across Africa and India, local names are being re-adopted to throw off colonial associations.
The problem has been made worse by the collapse of the former Soviet Union, where large numbers of countries in central Asia are changing the names of their cities in order to revert to pre-Communist times.
David Munro, director of the Scottish Royal Geographical Society and head of the permanent committee on geographical names for British official use, said the UN’s aim was to keep abreast of changes so everyone knew exactly where places were.
”It is important for all sorts of administrative reasons,” he said. ”For example, for aid agencies to direct aid, if they are not sure where somewhere is, how can they get the food to the right people?”
Changing place names can lead to more than simple confusion. The Ministry of Defence employs three people at the Royal Geographical Society in London to keep up to date with name changes across the world.
This has a dual use — to prevent the Foreign Office creating embarrassment by using an ”old” name, and to keep people such as the Defence Intelligence Staff and GCHQ up to date on names terrorists or other political groups might use in their own language.
There had also been examples in the first Gulf war where bombs had been dropped in the wrong place because of a misunderstanding about names.
Examples of place name confusion abound. In Israel, the city known as Jerusalem in England is called Yerushalayim in Hebrew and variously Urshalim and al-Quds in Arabic. All four versions were now starting to appear on maps so there was no confusion.
Naming places is a highly political and potentially dangerous decision. The former Yugoslav republic which now calls itself Macedonia found itself close to war with neighbouring Greece over its new name, because Greece feared an attempt at annexation of its northern province, also called Macedonia.
Officially, the UN calls the country the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia or FYROM, but even the UN’s expert committee on names, chaired by Helen Kerfoot, concedes that no one in Macedonia uses the name.
For countries such as South Africa, which has 11 official languages, the situation is even more acute.
A city called Cape Town in English is Kaapstad in Afrikaans and eKapa in the local Xhosa language. The government is still grappling with how to deal with this issue.
Even in Canada, where Kerfoot comes from, there can be problems. Among French and Inuit communities, place names are changing.
For example, the large bay named after the English explorer Frobisher is now called Iqaluit Bay at the request of the Inuit, who had called it by that name before Canada existed.
One problem for toponymists has been the recasting of anglicised names to reflect their origins. In Asia, for example, Tashkent was corrected to become Toshkent and Samarkand on the Silk Road to China has become Samarqand. – Guardian Unlimited Â