UNGEGN Meeting & Symposium

The INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES - August 5^th, 2009

Theme -

"Geographical Names as Part of the Cultural Heritage in the Asia-Pacific Region"

Background -

The practice of assigning names to geographical objects and locations is as old as Man's perception of his geographical environment: toponyms are the linguistic expression of the bond between Man and Earth. Keeping this in mind, we need not be astonished that among our geographic names, even those currently yet in use, we encounter the most ancient vestiges of Language: our species' exclusive medium of shared experience, the cement of human civilization.

As elements of language, names belong to peoples as much as to the objects named. They mark the relationship between a people and its place on Earth. Names change as people move, as they lose or gain power, as they change their habits regarding their geographic environment. But names never change by themselves. If they are not explicitly replaced, they are inherited. Inherited names erode with the language of their users, but not at the same pace. Fixed to the Earth as they are, geographical names either inherited or not, resist change more than do the terms by which movables go. They resist change so much that their sound tends to outlive their descriptive meaning. But even if at one point of time the latter is no longer understood, if it is no longer recognized or even rendered irrelevant because the nature, the use or the appearance of what it used to describe is no longer there, it still echoes on by the sound of the name itself. Kuala Lumpur - somewhere under the impressive skyline of Cyber City, a memory of a muddy river mouth lingers on. Singapore - the proud Asian Tiger will always remain a Lion City, whatever the future will bring. Ja(ya)karta - Indonesia's booming 'Big Durian', will be glorious and prosperous forever.

In our contemporary globalizing, digitizing world, the need to 'freeze' the evolution of geographic names and standardize their writing is urgently felt. For more than four decades now, efforts to this effect have been coordinated by the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN). The standardization recommended is vigorously undertaken by an ever increasing number of national authorities. National boards of geographic names take decisions based on field work typically carried out by teams of topographic surveyors, and processed behind the doors of specialized government offices. As it is essentially the written form of the names that is being conserved in official standards, the semantic and historical information contained in any toponym is nevertheless at peril of being lost in the process.

A geographic name is more than a well-sounding synonym to a pair of geographical coordinates. It embodies an intangible, but nevertheless invaluable part of a nation's cultural heritage. Especially in the counties of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with their extreme cultural, ethnic and linguistic diversity, the collection and maintenance of geographic names is a great task indeed. More than a mere act of administration, it is a much-encompassing aspect of a nation's cultural treasure keeping. Topographers, linguists, historians and anthropologists should join forces to take up this noble task - a task for which no single discipline qualifies. The roles of them are expected to assist on preserving of our ancestor cultural heritage.

Sub-themes of the symposium which are offered as follows -

Safeguarding cultural heritage

1. Indigenous languages as expressed in place names

2. Enrichment of regional identities in place names

3. National principles, policies and procedures in place names

4. Toponymy in geography education