Talk:List of city name changes

Notes

I'm not sure that in this list should be names of cities that they had before they get city status (when they were villages). For example, for Russian cities: village "Alexandrovskoye" get city status and get it's new name "Alexandrovka" in 1926. Another example, more obvious: village "Zavoyko" was renamed to village "Yelizovo" in 1924, and long after in 1975 village "Yelizovo" get city status, so there was no city "Zavoyko" at all, only village with this name. The article title is "List of city name changes" so I guess here must be only changes of city names. In Russia, for example, there are a lot of villages that were renamed, it is also interesting information, but it should be written in another article, I guess. Tell me if I'm wrong, please. Maximaximax 04:01, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)

One of the problems is that I do not always have information on when the city status was granted. Another thing is that most of the entities listed are technically not cities, but towns (and yes, I know that it is very hard to determine when a town becomes a city—I am generally looking at the 100,000 population mark, but that's pretty arbitrary and arguable, especially since no guidelines exist—after all, they are all just "города" in Russian). So, I was including all settlements that are, or ever used to be (like Partizansk), cities/towns, even if some of the name changes occured when they only had a village or urban settlement status. I did not, of course, include (or intended to include) the settlements that never had a status of the city/town—that kind of information would indeed overwhelm this article and does not really belong here anyway.

If you have any suggestions on how to overcome these problems, please share them here. I will continue as I did before—we can always clean the article up later if it becomes necessary.--Ëzhiki (erinaceus europeaus) 16:04, Aug 12, 2004 (UTC)

May be we should mark villages with italic for example. Another problem - because cities were renamed not English, it's better to display orginal names and their transliteration. Another suggestion is to include years of rename also, like below:

1703: Санктпитербурх (Sanctpiterburh) > 1724: Санктъ-Петербург (Sankt-Peterburg) > 1914: Петроград (Petrograd) > 1924: Ленинград (Leningrad) > 1991: Санкт-Петербург (Sankt-Peterburg) = en: Saint Petersburg

Maximaximax 04:47, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Marking villages with italics is a good idea, but the problem of figuring out when a city status was received still stands. I just do not have this information for enough cities.

As for the original names and transliteration, I disagree. This amount of information would unnecessarily overwhelm the article. I would think that this information should go to the article on a particular city (see Adygeysk as an example of what I mean). In this case if someone interested in the Russian spelling of the city name can simply go to the article on that city, which should contain that information. Of course, that would require creating quite a few (now missing) articles (or stubs) on a lot of cities, but hey, who's afraid of a little challenge? One can also try the article on the Russian wikipedia.

Finally, I have a question about Sanctpiterburh. I never heard of this variant, yet alone that it was an official name of the city before 1914. And the Russian spelling of that name looks really funky. Can you tell me where this information came from? Just curious...

--Ëzhiki (erinaceus europeaus) 13:37, Aug 13, 2004 (UTC)

About sources to check the city names, city statuses and rename years: http://www.mojgorod.ru/ - very good, but unfortunately, not updated since 2001. About "Санктпитербурх" - try to search it in the Internet, for me it was also very interesting. And again - changes from "Санктпитербурх" to "Санкт-Петербург" cannot be shown using only English names, so that was a reason why I suggested to use local names. Maximaximax 14:58, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Change in jurisdiction

Many cities changed jurisdiction and thus official language, Gdansk has always been Gdansk for the Poles and Danzig for the Germans, no name change actuall occurred. see: Names of European cities in different languages. And how about Bozen-Bolzano that was simply Bozen before WWI? There are hundreds of cities that changed name in this way in Upper Silesia, Macedonia, and elsewhere. Andreas 00:03, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Greece

Many place names were officially renamed in the 1920's, especially in Macedonia and Thrace, but also in the rest of the country. This concerns mainly villages and small towns, whereas cities always had a Greek population and therefore Greek names that were used alongside Slavic, Turkish and other names.

The name changes were sanctioned by the Government and are documented in the Greek Government Gazette of the time.   Andreas   ^(T) 19:12, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

Salonica certainly didn't always have a (majority) Greek population. At any rate, you should add these if you can find evidence. john k 21:46, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

Original Name of York, England

"Efrawg → Eboracum/Eburacum → Eoferwic → Jorvik → York" Someone obviously doesn't understand anything about the origins of Celtic language. The name the Romans used 2000 years ago can't possibly be derived from a Modern Welsh form. The Latin name actually represents an original Brittonic 'Eburacon' Pictonon (talk) 05:27, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

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Scope of this page

This page has a serious scope problem. It was originally created in 2004 as a list of "cities who [sic] changed their name over the course of history" [1] – a description so vague it could lead to the addition of pretty much every place on earth that is older than a century or two (since every toponym on earth is subject to natural language change). In 2005 somebody attempted to clarify by linking the words "changed their name" to Geographical renaming [2], which is a different, much narrower concept. Finally, in July 2011, somebody changed the lead sentence to restrict coverge to places "whose names were officially changed at one or more points in history. It does not include gradual changes in spelling that took place over long periods of time." [3] However, it seems nobody ever made any attempt at actually enforcing this restricted scope. Editors before and after have been happily adding names that are examples of exactly what the page is supposedly not for: trivial cases of natural phonological change. And the list has been growing on and on and on.

So, can we get a consensus here what the scope of this page is meant to be, and then actually weed out those entries that don't belong? Currently, all of the following types are included indiscriminately:

1. Placenames that have simply been undergoing natural phonological change (Placentia/Piacenza)
2. Placenames where natural phonological change co-occured with borrowing or calquing from one local language to another (Eboracum/York)
3. Places where an official decision of change was triggered by a change in administration, where one language community imposed their own (pre-existing) name variant over that of another (Danzig/Gdansk)
4. Places where an official decision of change merely concerned which of two (pre-existing) language-specific variants was to be regarded as official (Bangalore/Bengaluru)
5. Places where a change affected only the rendering (e.g. Romanization method) in foreign languages, but the local name remained the same (Tientsin/Tianjin)
6. Places that were actually renamed, i.e. where the same local speech community and authorities started to use an entirely new name as the result of a deliberate political decision (Leningrad/St Petersburg)

Which of these should be in, which should be out? Personally, I'm for restricting it to #6 alone. Fut.Perf. ☼ 13:02, 6 November 2016 (UTC)

Since nobody has been responding here, I'll go ahead and start removing at least clear instances of types #1-2. Fut.Perf. ☼ 14:37, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

I agree with your proposal. Arthistorian1977 (talk) 18:02, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

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Indian listing

Currently for India there are at least three lists. The info here should be over at Renaming of cities in India. There is also a list at List of renamed places in India.

There should be only one list. Especially as India has rampant mania for renaming itself far outstripping anywhere else it would seem.

This is crazy. One list would cut down a lot on administration and make the whole process of cataloguing more efficient.

The list here, is not even in order, and it contains some items that don't appear on the other lists I mentioned. I would propose we do away with this section and set it up as a redirect elsewhere to Renaming of cities in India.

In addition we should think of formatting this list in a way that would lend itself to downloading onto a spreadsheet. Broichmore (talk) 11:45, 13 September 2019 (UTC)

Vancouver was never known as Wu'muthkweyum

This article states that Vancouver, Canada changed it's name from Wu'muthkweyum. I do not think this was the case. Wu'muthkweyum is not the same as Vancouver, rather just occupied the same geographic area. Vancouver did formerly used to be called Granville, though. I will change it if no one objects Zacharycmango (talk) 17:40, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

shamefully eurocentric

re australian placename changes we urgently need a list of all the aboriginal names that were replaced by colonial names. or are we going to complain that they were not all necessarily officially recorded in the first place? we need a hyperlink to indigenization and for context, 'see also' Africanization, Zimbabwe, etc. also the 'Australian place names changed from German names', 'geographical renaming' and 'naming disputes'. NotPedanticReally (talk) 08:42, 12 June 2021 (UTC)

Move texts to Main articles if they exist

Otherwise we are creating WP:REDUNDANTFORKs. I'll do that now. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 12:49, 5 March 2023 (UTC)