From Dingle to Bangalore

There's a couple of similar stories in the news of late.

Both involve places that want to change their names "back" to something that is more indicative of their cultural heritage.

Good idea?

Hard to know.

What I do know is that the town of Dingle in the south-west of Ireland had been going through a process of name change.

It was one of those "will we / won't we" situations where some people were in favour of the change while others were not. The idea was to change the name back to An Daingean, the original Irish name of the town.

Needless to say it got a bit heated with suggestions flying about that "all these outsiders" living in the town were against the name change, with others saying the name change being pushed so passionately by "traditionalists" was impractical.

They went ahead and changed the sign on the edge of the town in 2004, removing the sign for Dingle and replacing it with a sign for An Daingean only.

There was something of an outcry from local businesses, claiming that Dingle was the name known to tourists and that the name change was throwing away the "valuable brand" that the town had built up.

Whatever way you look at it, there was probably some truth in that view. Some more forthright people even went ahead and erected their own sign, determined to keep that name alive.

Anyway, they couldn't work it out and the only way to resolve it was to call a referendum of people living in the area. Only one third of people living in the area can vote though.

To date no decision has been taken on when the vote will take place.

And then one of my colleagues in the office was telling me that the authorities in India want to change the name of the city of Bangalore to Bangaluru. In fact they already have. Well sort of. On November 1 the new name was to come into effect but it has not been officially ratified. There is some debate over whether this will actually take place.

Of course India has some prior experience with this name change idea, having changed the name of Bombay back to Mumbai and Calcutta back to Kalkotta. In fact 20 cities in India have been renamed since British rule ended in the late 1940s.

Russia did it. South Africa is trying to do it. They both had good reasons to change the names of cities.

But for the rest of us. Is there really much to be gained from changing the name?