The University of Johannesburg Press has just released The Presence of Minority and Indigenous Languages in Urban Naming, documenting the 7th International Symposium on Place Names held in Bloemfontein in September 2023. For anyone interested in how power, memory, and identity get inscribed into city streets, this collection offers crucial insights from Southern African and international scholars.
Why Urban Naming Matters
Street names aren't neutral administrative labels - they're political statements frozen into daily geography. When cities rename streets, remove colonial commemorations, or standardize indigenous place names, they're negotiating fundamental questions: Whose history gets preserved? Which languages deserve official recognition? How do minority communities maintain visibility in urban spaces dominated by majority cultures?
This volume tackles these questions across remarkably diverse contexts, from Maseru's linguistic landscape to Slovenian microtoponyms surviving in bilingual Hungarian territory.
Five Studies, Multiple Perspectives
Peter Jordan opens with commemorative naming's inherent problems - the tension between honoring the past and creating inclusive present-day urban environments. His contribution frames the core dilemma: how do cities balance historical memory with contemporary diversity?
The Maseru study (Kolobe, Mokala, Mosebi) navigates Lesotho's capital, where street naming reflects complex linguistic negotiations between Sesotho, English, and various commemorative traditions. Their work reveals how naming practices create visible linguistic hierarchies in postcolonial urban settings.
Ernestina Rapeane-Mathonsi's critical toponymic analysis examines a southern African city's naming practices, demonstrating how linguistic landscapes either validate or marginalize indigenous languages through official nomenclature choices.
The Slovenian microtoponyms research (Geršič, Horvat, Pipan) documents something remarkable: small-scale place names preserving Slovenian linguistic heritage in Hungarian territory. These microtoponyms—names for fields, streams, neighborhoods - often survive long after official nomenclature erases minority languages. They're linguistic archaeology embedded in landscape.
Perhaps most fascinating is the South African Sign Language (SASL) study by de Lange and colleagues. If SASL is an official language, should cities have official sign-language place names? The question exposes assumptions about what constitutes "official" naming - must it be written? Visual? How do Deaf communities navigate urban spaces when no standardized SASL toponyms exist?
What Emerges From the Data
Several threads connect these diverse studies:
Etymology as resistance: Understanding place-name origins reveals suppressed histories. When indigenous names get translated, transliterated, or replaced, etymological research becomes political act - recovering meanings that dominant cultures tried to erase.
Informal vs. formal naming: Communities often maintain unofficial names long after authorities impose new ones. These parallel naming systems document cultural persistence against homogenizing pressures.
The guideline problem: Every study highlights inadequate frameworks for managing multilingual urban naming. Authorities lack consistent principles for preserving minority languages while maintaining practical navigability.
Symbolic value: Place names carry emotional and cultural weight far exceeding their navigational function. Renaming isn't just updating maps - it's renegotiating collective identity.
For Whom This Matters
This isn't just academic abstraction. The research has direct implications for:
- Urban planners managing linguistically diverse cities
- Policy makers developing inclusive naming guidelines
- Minority language activists advocating for toponymic recognition
- Toponymists studying how languages persist through place names
- Anyone interested in how cities encode power relations into geography
The South African context is particularly instructive. Post-apartheid place-name transformation has been ongoing for three decades, offering longitudinal data on what works (and doesn't) when societies attempt linguistic justice through nomenclature.
Freely Accessible
Crucially, UJ Press published this as open access - freely downloadable in PDF, EPUB, and XML formats. This isn't scholarship locked behind paywalls but knowledge shared internationally, particularly valuable for researchers in the Global South working on similar questions.
The symposium brought together Austrian, Lesotho, Slovenian, and South African scholars, creating comparative perspectives impossible from single-nation studies. When Slovenian researchers studying minority toponyms in Hungary dialogue with South African scholars examining indigenous urban naming, patterns emerge that national scholarship alone couldn't reveal.
The Unfinished Project
What makes this volume intellectually honest is its implicit acknowledgment: there are no perfect solutions. Preserving every indigenous microtoponym while maintaining navigable urban infrastructure creates genuine tensions. Commemorating historical figures in street names risks freezing colonial or authoritarian legacies into contemporary geography. Standardizing minority language names makes them official but potentially rigid.
The research doesn't pretend to resolve these contradictions. Instead, it documents them carefully, providing evidence for ongoing debates about how multilingual democracies can create urban landscapes where multiple linguistic communities see themselves reflected.
For scholars of toponymy, linguistic landscape studies, or postcolonial urbanism, this collection is essential reading. For anyone who's ever wondered why their city's street names tell only certain stories, it's revelatory.
Download free: UJ Press - The Presence of Minority and Indigenous Languages in Urban Naming
Citation: Loth, C-R. (Ed.). (2025). The Presence of Minority and Indigenous Languages in Urban Naming: Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Place Names 2023. UJ Press. https://doi.org/10.64449/9781997468639
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