When Did We Agree on Place Names?

The short answer is: we didn’t, not all at once. The standardization of place names—a field known as toponymy—is not a single event but a messy, ongoing process. It’s a fascinating tug-of-war between how people have historically spoken, how governments want to be seen, and how the international community tries to keep everyone on the same page.

The Official Arbiters: Governments and Global Bodies

In most countries, the buck stops with a national naming authority. In the United States, this is the Board on Geographic Names (BGN), established in 1890. Its primary mission is to ensure standardized name usage for all federal government purposes. This isn’t just bureaucratic tidiness; it’s a matter of life and death. When a 911 dispatcher, a helicopter pilot, and a fire crew all need to get to “Coyote Canyon”, they must all be looking at the same Coyote Canyon on their maps.

These boards weigh several factors:

• Local Usage: What do the people who live there actually call it? This is often the most heavily weighted factor.
• Historical Precedent: What has it been called in historical documents and maps?
• Language and Orthography: Does the name conform to the spelling and grammar rules of the region’s dominant language?

On an international scale, the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN) works to encourage standardization globally. Their guiding principle is a simple but powerful one: each country has the sovereign right to determine its own official place names. The UNGEGN’s goal is to promote the consistent use of those official names—the endonyms—in international communication.

Endonyms vs. Exonyms: Speaking Locally on a Global Stage

This brings us to a crucial linguistic distinction. An endonym is the name for a place used by the people who live there, in their own language. A German person lives in Deutschland, a resident of Italy’s capital lives in Roma, and a citizen of Egypt lives in Miṣr.

An exonym is the name for a place used by foreigners, in their language. English speakers refer to those same places as Germany, Rome, and Egypt. Exonyms arise naturally from historical contact, linguistic mutation, and sometimes, simple mispronunciation.

Historically, exonyms were the norm. But in a post-colonial world, there’s a strong push, championed by the UNGEGN, to favor endonyms. When a country asks the world to call it Côte d’Ivoire instead of Ivory Coast, or Türkiye instead of Turkey, it’s asserting its linguistic and cultural identity on the world stage, asking to be called by its own name rather than a name given to it by outsiders.

The People vs. The Powers That Be

Place names are born in two primary ways: from the bottom up or from the top down. Bottom-up names emerge organically from common usage. A town gets its name from a descriptive feature (Long Beach), a local family (Jones Creek), or an indigenous word whose original meaning might even be lost to time. These are the names that feel most natural because they were created by the people who inhabited the space.

Top-down naming is a different beast entirely. It happens when an authority—a government, a monarch, a colonizing power—imposes a name for political, commemorative, or ideological reasons. Consider the whirlwind history of Russia’s second-largest city:

1. St. Petersburg (1703): Founded by and named for Tsar Peter the Great.
2. Petrograd (1914): Renamed at the start of WWI to sound less German (“-burg”) and more Russian (“-grad”).
3. Leningrad (1924): Renamed after the death of Vladimir Lenin to honor the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution.
4. St. Petersburg (1991): Renamed back to its original form after the fall of the Soviet Union, reflecting a rejection of the communist era.

Each name change was a powerful political statement, an attempt to rewrite the very identity of the city on the map.

A Tale of Two Cities: The Mumbai vs. Bombay Debate

Perhaps no modern example illustrates this tension better than “Mumbai” versus “Bombay.” The name Bombay is an Anglicized version of the Portuguese name Bombaim (“good little bay”). It became the standard name under British colonial rule.

The name Mumbai, however, has deeper local roots. It’s derived from Mumbā, the name of a local Hindu goddess, Mumbādevī, and Aai, which means “mother” in the local Marathi language. For centuries, Marathi and Gujarati speakers—the local inhabitants—had been using variations of this name.

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” – William Shakespeare. But when it comes to cities, a name carries the weight of history, culture, and power.

In 1995, the name was officially changed to Mumbai. The change was driven by the Shiv Sena, a Hindu nationalist political party that had just won power in the state of Maharashtra. For them, shedding “Bombay” was a symbolic act of decolonization, a way to throw off a colonial-era label and reassert a regional, Marathi identity. Today, “Mumbai” is the undisputed official name used by the Indian government and in most international contexts. Yet, “Bombay” lingers—in the names of institutions like the Bombay Stock Exchange and the Bombay High Court, in the hearts of older residents, and in the lexicon of the global diaspora. It’s a living reminder that official decrees don’t instantly erase centuries of usage.

Mapping the Modern World

In the digital age, this process has a new, powerful arbiter: the map in your pocket. Companies like Google and Apple hold immense power in shaping our geographical consensus. When you search for a city, Google Maps or Apple Maps must choose one name to display. They generally defer to the BGN and other national bodies for official U.S. names and to the UNGEGN-endorsed endonyms for international places.

But this can become incredibly fraught in disputed territories. Is it the “Sea of Japan” or the “East Sea”? The “Persian Gulf” or the “Arabian Gulf”? Depending on where you are in the world, Google Maps may show you a different name, a diplomatic balancing act to avoid taking a side in a geopolitical conflict.

So, When Do We Agree?

The truth is, agreement on place names is a moving target. Names are not just labels; they are living artifacts of language, condensed stories of conquest, independence, culture, and identity. We agree on a name when there is a consensus of power—be it the power of a government to issue a decree, the power of local people to maintain a tradition, or the power of historical memory.

The next time you look at a map, remember that you’re not just looking at a list of places. You’re looking at a snapshot of an ongoing global conversation about who we are, where we’ve come from, and who gets to decide.