Can language alter geography? Given the old-fashioned notion of “geography”, you might think so: most languages have their own names for foreign places, regardless of what the foreigners who actually live there may think. Certainly, so used, language can reflect politics; many a government has tried it. But let’s reverse the question: can, and should, geography alter language?

English, the leading tongue of Western imperialism, was naturally happy to tell other people where they lived, witness any map of the United States of America or Canada, Australia or New Zealand. Even my modest atlas lists some 25 geographical entities worldwide named after Queen Victoria. Rhodesia owed its name to that arch empire-builder, Cecil Rhodes; its capital, Salisbury, not to the British city but to Lord Salisbury, a British prime minister of the time.

Yet the British did not rush into the linguistic takeover of more advanced bits of their Empire. In India, indeed, as Clive once impudently claimed of his depredations there, they could “stand astonished at their own moderation”.

The Western name for India long predates the British: 1,900 years ago, a Roman poet wrote of psittacus eois imitatrix alis ab Indis — “the parrot, the imitative bird from the eastern Indies”. The British gave the subcontinent tiny Macleodganj and grander Campbellpore, reminders of the countless Scots who largely ran their Empire. And Cox’s Bazar, Everest, and the McMahon Line. Yet little else, whatever recent name-changes might suggest. Fort St George was a typical 18th-century colonial name; not so Madras, which it grew into. Linguistically, there’s nothing English about Bombay or Calcutta, Benares or Bangalore.

Natural right?

Most often, the British simply anglicized Indian names in the spelling of the day. At times, oddly: Ganga became Ganges (“Ganjeez”), the HimaLAYas were so pronounced and stressed. But Poona is as good as Pune, Oudh as Awadh, even if most of today’s Britons would rhyme it with loud. Likewise, Punjab (and a lot better than the “Poonjab” of some broadcasters more familiar with the sound-values of modern transliteration than with India).

English names these days are everywhere on the retreat, mainly for political reasons; Rhodesia is now Zambia and Zimbabwe, Salisbury is Harare. Even Nyasaland, only half-English, became Malawi. (Soweto remains, however. Naturally, you might think — a typically African name. Not so: it began life as South-West Township).

It’s happening even in the British Isles — a name itself contested by the southern Irish. They long since turned Queenstown into Cobh; now in the north, the Protestants Londonderry is losing ground to the Catholics’ plain Derry. Drive west from London to Newport, and as you cross the Welsh border, the road-signs suddenly talk also of Cas Newydd — the city’s name in a tongue not used by two Newport citizens in a hundred.

Europe has seen plenty of this linguistic politicking, especially after 1945. Ancient Danzig, a hot spot in 1939, reappeared as the Gdansk of Poland’s future Solidarity trade union, and umpteen other once German-named places now have Polish ones. The break-up of the Soviet Union had a like effect, as Ukraine and other new countries paraded their independence. In Asia, Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City, and Yerushalayim is challenged by al-Quds.

Yet all that is indeed politics. The real oddity is different: the way one nation or language gives its own names to the geography of others for no evident reason at all. Is this linguistic arrogance, or merely exercise of a natural right? I’ll be back to these issues in two weeks’ time.