The importance of geographical names

Geographical names impact upon many areas of life, including:

Business/trade

National statistics/census

Property rights/cadastre

Urban & regional planning

Environment - sustainable development/conservation

Aid delivery/national disaster relief

Security/Peacekeeping

Search & rescue operations

Map/Atlas production

Navigation

Tourism

Communications (including postal & media services)

Geographical names are essentially labels which distinguish one part of the earth’s surface from another, and as such they must be considered with great care.  Operations during the First World War had demonstrated to Her Majesty's Government the dangers involved in using products with discrepant names.  Geographical names form a uniquely important part of any map or chart.  Because they are written words, unlike most other information on a map, it is the names which are the most meaningful information for the user.  Most importantly, it is the names which inform the user of that most vital piece of information; the location which the map portrays.  And it is precisely this particular map attribute – the geographical name – which cannot be identified from imagery.

Geographical names do not exist in a vacuum.  Because they reflect human occupancy, they provide important information concerning politics and culture.  Names vary most obviously in a spatial manner, from one location to another.  They also change through time, as demonstrated most visibly by the many name changes which the world experiences, eg Salisbury → Harare (Zimbabwe).  Equally, albeit less obviously, they can alter through factors such as a change of political sovereignty, eg Kishinev (Soviet Union) → Chişinău (Moldova), or language orthography, eg Erigavo → Ceerigaabo (Somalia).  And names differ also through the contexts of language and politics; the town in Iraq known as Arbīl in Arabic is known as Hawlēr in Kurdish.

Under what circumstances might our familiar name Venice be preferable to the local Italian form Venezia?  When should the Czech name Praha be used in place of the English "conventional name" Prague?  The choice of which name to apply will often depend on the context.  For more details, please go to our page on English conventional names.

And how should we treat geographical names whose original forms are not in Roman script?  For geographical names to make sense on UK products, there is a requirement for romanization systems to handle each of the non-Roman script languages of the world.

It was the need to consider factors such as these, and to avoid the application on UK products of carelessly discrepant names, that was identified by the Admiralty as an absolute necessity during the First World War, and which led on the Admiralty’s initiative to the formation of the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names (PCGN) in 1919.