The UN Group of Experts on Geographic Names held its 16th meeting in Bali last week in parallel with the 2009 South East Asian Survey Congress (SEASC, 3-7 August. It comes at a time when the naming of geographic features is becoming increasingly controversial in Indonesia.
Mardiyanto, Indonesia's minister of home affairs addressed the meeting as the chair of an Indonesian team for the standardisation of local place names. Members come from a variety of government ministries.
He told the meeting that names have important cultural and historical significance. Foreign names - especially those that were given to places as a result of foreign domination or control - will need to be 'scrutinised' so that they do not 'mess up the original names', he said.
Helen Kerfoot, the UNGEGN chair, welcomed the move towards nations accepting the importance of place names. When countries fail to do this they run the risk of having culturally inappropriate names imposed on them, she said.
The Group is planning to develop a global database of all place names with a population of greater than 100,000. Kerfoot said the names would have to be provided by competent national authorities.
The database will be loaded with the official romanised versions of all place names. In the past, place names have changed simply because of a change in accepted methods of romanising sounds, for example Peking to Beijing.
The group expects the database to be ready in September, said Kerfoot.
