Geographical Renaming - Exonyms and Endonyms

Exonyms and Endonyms

For geographical entities with multiple pre-existing names in one or more languages, an exonym or endonym may gradually be substituted and used in the English language.

• Transfer of a city between countries with very different patterns of phonology can result in seeming changes of name. Changes can be so slight as Straßburg (Germany) and Strasbourg (France). Some are less subtle: Selanik in the Ottoman Empire became Salonica in Greece; "Pilsen" in the Austro-Hungarian Empire became Plzeň in Czechoslovakia; Kishinev in the Russian Empire became Chișinău, Romania after World War I, reverted to Kishinev in the Soviet Union after World War II, and again Chișinău when Moldova achieved independence from the Soviet Union. Some are translations; Karlsbad became Karlovy Vary.

When the formerly-German city of Danzig came under Polish rule, it became known in English by its Polish name of Gdańsk. Note though, that when Winston Churchill gave his Iron Curtain speech he still spoke of a city in Poland by its German name (Stettin) instead of its contemporary Polish name Szczecin even though Churchill fully accepted the transfer of the formerly-German city to Poland, probably because German phonology is far closer than Polish phonology is to English phonology. The pattern is far from uniform, and it takes time.

• The Soviet Union replaced German city names in the former East Prussia that became the Kaliningrad Oblast and Japanese place names in southern Sakhalin Island with Russian names unrelated to the old German and Japanese place names after annexing them in the aftermath of World War II.

• The military junta changed the official English name of Burma to Myanmar in 1988, even though both were pre-existing names which originated from the Burmese language and used interchangeably depending on contexts (see Names of Burma).

• Decolonisation in India saw a trend to adopt local names in place of Europe-centric ones since 1947. Since then, changes have included Chennai (from Madras in August 1996), Kolkata (from Calcutta in January 2001) and Mumbai (from Bombay in 1991), amongst many others.

• The People's Republic of China, upon its founding and new nationalities policy, changed the names of cities in ethnic minority regions from sometimes patronising Chinese language names to those of the native language. For example, it changed Dihua to Ürümqi and Zhenxi to Barkol.