DEV/2117

EXPERTS PREPARE GLOBAL LIST OF COUNTRY NAMES, RECOGNIZE VALUE OF USING INTERNET

The document is being circulated for further comments and corrections and will be presented at the Seventh Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names, to be held in Tehran in September 1997.

Such lists are made possible by using internationally agreed systems of transliteration providing a standardized and accepted way of rendering non-Roman scripts into the Roman script. The Group finalized new transliteration tables for Thailand, Pakistan (Urdu) and Iran (Farsee). This brings the number of transliteration systems agreed by the experts to 13.

The meeting considered 102 working papers covering the main areas of the Group's concerns. These include training courses in toponymy (the study of names derived from the name of a place), toponymic terminology, romanization systems and standardization.

The Geneva meeting was attended by 90 experts representing 17 linguistic/geographical divisions from 45 countries. The Chairman of the Group, Peter Raper (South Africa) noted with regret the absence of representatives of sub-Saharan African States and the small number from Latin America. However, he said that was largely due to a lack of resources.

He also said that there is a growing awareness of the value of agreeing on national standards for place names, especially in states where more than one language is in common use or officially recognized. The Group had received reports on training courses held since the last meeting in China, Latin America and South Africa.

- 2 - Press Release DEV/2117 23 August 1996

"Where there isn't a centrally coordinated standards-setting body you find similar work done by different departments leading to overlap, waste, ambiguity and confusion as some place names are known by different names or the same names may have different spellings", Mr. Raper said, citing South Africa's emphasis on standard names, especially after it moved from having two official languages to now having 11.

The Group emphasizes the importance of accepted national standards and promotes national names for use internationally. One of its aims is to reduce the use of "exonyms" which are foreign names for places, for example Genf, Ginebra and Geneva are exonyms for Geneve.

This year's meeting recognized the immense potential of the Internet for providing an efficient and easily updated list of geographical names to a broad audience and increasing awareness of the importance of standardized place names.

"It provides us with a way to let more and more people know about our programmes", says the Group's deputy chair, Helen Kerfoot of Canada, "so instead of being in the attic we'll be out front and visible. Standardization such as we offer will also be essential for people searching the Internet and those maintaining indexes, who depend on a universally accepted standard spelling."

Although one of the less well-known areas of United Nations work, the Group of Experts, and the work of their five-yearly conferences, is crucial for map and atlas production, air traffic, tourism, population census and national statistics, urban and regional planning as well as many areas of trade and commerce. The emergence in the 1990s of many States following the break-up of the former Soviet Union has added additional challenges to the Group's work.

The Department for Development Support and Management Services of the United Nations Secretariat organized the session and provides substantial services for the Group, its sessions and the United Nations Conferences on the Standardization of Geographical Names.

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