So, we read in the news this week that the government of New Zealand has never counted 'North Island' and 'South Island' as official names, and is now agonising about whether the names should be replaced. It shouldn't surprise us, but does it matter?
Map from The Times Universal Atlas of the World.
One of our concerns as collectors and publishers of world place names has always been "What is the official spelling of this?". The answer is not always very straightforward - sometimes it's easier to establish the correct spelling of some village in Gabon or Kazakhstan than in the Hebrides. Place name authorities all over the world compile beautiful, multi-functional online databases (or else don't bother - actually that's still quite usual), and the linguistic experts argue, while we stand on the sidelines wondering if they will ever agree.
New Zealand has for years been working hard to do justice to Maori names. It has resulted in several notable name changes, sometimes producing joint-language names as the correct official name - which are then of course not very likely to be used in everyday speech. Official names such as Aoraki/Mount Cook. Stewart Island/Rakiura. "Mount Taranaki or Mount Egmont". These are the single official name, not a main name with an alternative: that's a vital distinction.
We however reserve the right to keep them separate, which we think most people do. But it does at least provoke us to decide which name to use as the main name, which is a help even if it does cause some surprises among the general public.
The revelation about the North Island/South Island issue provokes, as always with these things, some truly daft comments (making you wonder what planet some people inhabit), but also a lot of basic common sense, and some quite good jokes.
Actually the New Zealand situation is not entirely a new one. It might in fact be quite common. Much the same applied to Newfoundland when I last checked a few years ago: nobody had ever recorded it as an official name, so you couldn't find it in the official database. And therefore you also couldn’t find any attributes about it - including whether it had any alternative names!
New Zealand's bilingual situation is not unique either. A lot of double-language naming has been happening in other countries too. In Spain, for instance technically there has been no Alicante for years - did you know that it's got to be Alicante-Alacant?
You might well say that there is an element of political correctness in all these official deliberations, and you might well be right; but it would be fairer to say that the people in charge of these things are caught between an island and a hard place.
As map makers and data compilers, what do we do with all this? Our let-out clause is, of course, that maybe we aren’t all that bothered whether the name has some technically official status after all. We take account of what the authorities come up with, and then we sprinkle it liberally with common sense. It's in use, that's the main thing. The rest is cross-references.
See related items on the BBC online and Times online.
Roger Pountain, Senior Information Analyst, Collins Geo
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