The thematic section opens with a highlight: Adriana Vescovo's contribution on Welsh toponymy in Argentine Patagonia is among the most vivid pieces of onomastic journalism the bulletin has run in recent memory. She traces how the first Welsh settlers, arriving in 1865 aboard the Mimosa, named the Chubut valley in their own language - giving rise to places like Trelew (Tre Lew, "Town of Lewis"), Trevelin (Tre Velin, "Village of the Mill"), and the magnificent Gorsedd y Cwmwl ("Throne of the Clouds") - and how those names now circulate between cartographic inconsistency and cultural heritage protection, through bilingual signage, municipal ordinances, and a workshop Vescovo herself organised in Trevelin in October 2025. The detail that Richard Jones Berwyn added the name of a Welsh mountain range as his own surname, and that Berwyn is now a common Patagonian surname, is the kind of onomastic fact that stays with you.
The theoretical backbone of the issue is provided by two articles from Peter Jordan, who contributes more to this bulletin than any other single author. His piece on place-name standardization in Austria is an admirably clear exposition of the country's subsidiary system - where naming authority rests at the lowest possible administrative level, down to the individual farmstead owner - and its consequences for minority languages, including the long and contested path to bilingual locality signs for Carinthian Slovenes that was only resolved by federal decree in 2011. His companion article, "Some principal thoughts on place-name standardization," is the most intellectually substantial piece in the issue: a concise treatment of who standardization actually serves (the local community? the nation? the international community?), the tensions between standardization and cultural diversity, and the growing influence of critical toponymastics, which frames standardization itself as a political act. Jordan's willingness to acknowledge that "standardization works against the wealth of culture expressed also in the wealth of place names" is a welcome note of critical honesty from a figure who has spent decades advancing standardization.
The national case studies that form the bulk of the thematic section vary considerably in ambition. Yuri Varyan's contribution from Armenia is conceptually interesting - his focus on diglossia and the 60+ Armenian dialects embedded in the national gazetteer raises important questions about the relationship between literary and spoken forms - though the article remains somewhat general. The contributions from Belgium (Jeanne Henrion) and Canada (Nicole Halseth and Steve Westley) are models of institutional clarity, explaining with precision how multilingual naming policy works in practice: Belgium's strict territorial linguistic regions, Canada's pan-Canadian bilingual list, and the gradual integration of Indigenous names in both countries. Andreas Hadjiraftis on Cyprus offers perhaps the most politically complex case, where the political division of the island since 1974 has created a parallel, unrecognised naming system in the north that the Republic of Cyprus must document without acknowledging - a toponymic situation with no easy resolution.
The two Chilean contributions from Betsabé Herrera Salinas and Felipe Hidalgo Leiva are the most original in the thematic section. Herrera Salinas's inventory of the Chilean bestiary in official toponymy - mythological creatures embedded in the map, from El Diablo Chileno (78 records) to the vampiric Piuchén (26 records, with no fewer than 14 spelling variants) - is a genuinely fresh piece of research that treats standardization as a problem of oral tradition and cultural memory, not merely orthography. Hidalgo Leiva's companion piece on the Ex Isla del Alacrán near Arica — an island that became a peninsula when an isthmus was artificially constructed in 1965, raising the question of which toponym class now applies - illustrates with perfect economy how geography itself can render names obsolete.
The "From the Countries" section contains three rewarding pieces. Stanislava Valcheva's tour of Bulgarian toponymy — tracing the name Balkan through 100 variants across centuries, and following Sofia from Serdica to Sredets to Sofia across a 17th-century map that shows both names in simultaneous use — is beautifully written and a good reminder that the bulletin does its best work when national contributors write with specific local knowledge rather than generic institutional prose. Eman Ahmed Oriby's sweeping account of Egypt's names through history, from Kemet to Um El Donia, with its comparative tables of how "Egypt" and "Misr" distribute across the world's languages, is encyclopaedic and useful.
The divisions and working groups sections offer two events of real significance to the broader community. Peter Jordan announces the GeoNames Symposium 2026 in Hermagor, Carinthia (12–13 October 2026), on the heritage value of microtoponyms - the intimate namescape of fields, springs, ditches, and farmsteads that is rapidly disappearing as agricultural societies transform - with proceedings to be published as Volume 10 of the Name & Place series. The Romano-Hellenic Division announces its symposium in Rome (3–5 June 2026) on toponymy and the Sustainable Development Goals, with a particular focus on gender balance in street naming and the lessons of historical toponymy for sustainable human-environment relationships.
The final section includes a brief but genuinely moving retrospective by Stefan Schweinfest, retiring Director of the UN Statistics Division, who recounts how he first encountered the word exonym in 2002 and spent the next two decades in service of the UNGEGN community. His three priorities for the future - building national names authorities, strengthening ties with UN-GGIM, and connecting toponymy to the post-2030 policy agenda - are well-chosen. The section also includes an informative piece by Jessie Pechmann of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team on the gaps and complementary strengths of OSM and OCHA data for populated place names in humanitarian contexts (in Sudan, only 38% of OSM populated places have a recorded name; in Somalia, 13%), with a proposal for AI-assisted, human-reviewed gap-filling.
The bulletin closes with Peter Jordan's announcement of the ICOS Congress Vienna, 16–20 August 2027 - which readers of this blog will already know, since we have been writing about it for some time.
Issue 71 will circulate in September 2026 under the theme "How toponymy can contribute to reach the Sustainable Development Goals." Contributions are welcome at geoinfo_unsd@un.org.
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