President of Naoero, David Adeang, speaks at the opening ceremony of Boao Forum of Asia, in Boao in southern China’s Hainan province on Thursday, March 28, 2024. The country changed its name from Nauru to Naoero in July. (AP Photo/Tian Macleod Ji, File)
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What’s in a name? Some countries which changed theirs over the course of the past decades found colonial remnants and foreign language influence and wanted to shake them, but name changes have also sought to settle disputes with neighbors or to represent a broader national identity.
In July, the tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru renamed itself Naoero, retiring the European rendering of its original indigenous name. President David Adeang framed the issue as self-determination, saying the change was about dignity and pride and that Nauruans should “bring our name home”.
This chart shows changes to official UN country names in English language made since 1945.
Statista
Only a handful of country name changes were requested at the United Nations since its inception that were independent of admission, independence, unification or country splits. Several more banished a colonial era name like the 1984 change of Upper Volta to Burkina Faso, the change of Ceylon to Sri Lanka notified in 1991 (but actually harking back to 1972) or when Swaziland became Eswatini (sometimes stylized eSwatini) in 2018.
Displayed in the above chart are changes to the English language name of countries registered at the UN, leading to a second, potentially trickier, type of name change — changing an English name to one in your own language. While this sounds potentially counterintuitive considering that many countries are referred to by wildly different names in different languages, name changes considered relatively successful have come out of this. The most prominent example is Côte d’Ivoire adopting its French name across all UN languages in 1985, making the nation an early adopter of this type of identity politics. The change of Cape Verde to the Portuguese Capo Verde followed in 2013. Finally, in 2022, the official name change of Turkey to the Turkish language version Türkiye took place — the success of which will be determined over the coming years and is potentially complicated by this being a first name change outside of typical colonial contexts.
All countries changing their names in these scenarios were looking to assert their identities and take charge of their own stories, interestingly at times abandoning names in their colonial languages and at other times actively choosing them. Two more examples on the list are actually even more murky, showing how there are no one-size-fits-all solutions as nations navigate colonial legacies that are still very present even in today’s world.
Embracing or rejecting colonial legacy names?
In 1960, the Republic of the Congo (Leopoldville) joined the UN and changed that to Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1964. In 1971, President Mobutu Sese Seko as part of a so-called authenticity campaign changed the country’s name to Zaire (it would revert back in 1997). English-speaking colonizers named the region and its mighty river after the local Kongo people, but Portuguese colonialists used Zaire based on the Kikongo river name nzere o zadi. While still colonial in origin, locally the latter version had stayed in use more. Later, in 1989, military-led Burma became Myanmar, based on a more formal name for its main ethnic group. Many continue to use the name Burma locally, however, saying it is not a British bastardization but based on Sanskrit (or to defy the junta).
Finally, one newer change, in 2019, resolved a dispute between Greece and the nation now known as North Macedonia over the region of Macedonia, which stretches across both countries. In 1997, Samoa officially dropped it modifier Western — without external pressure, but to rid itself of a colonial remnant distinguishing it from American Samoa that was not deemed necessary anymore. Going all the way back to 1974, Dahomy became Benin after the Bay of Benin to give the country a more universal name instead of one based on one ethnic group or region in the country’s south.
