Place-name standardization is a highly controversial topic and for this very reason not always successful and consequent. The main cleavages arise between local (e.g., respecting dialect forms), regional (achieving regional uniformity), national (respecting standard language forms) and international (respecting names of an international trade language) interests; group interests (e.g., minorities versus majority, commercial versus academic, private versus public); and the intention to preserve place names as cultural heritage and demands to adapt them continuously to modern requirements – to give every new generation and political power the opportunity of shaping its own ‘namescape’.

The last is perhaps the least in the focus of current discussions, because after the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of 2003 explicitly including all expressions of language and thus implicitly also place names, it is the leading paradigm to preserve place names as cultural heritage as much as possible and to avoid any changes. This has certainly its strong justification if one considers the significant symbolic value of places names for space-related identities or their function as keys to cultural history. In an open scientific discussion, however, also counterarguments may be highlighted and thoroughly evaluated. While there is broad agreement on the undesirability of the commercialization of places names and an even stronger impact of political dominators on the namescape, in particular street and other urban names, other adaptions of place names to cultural change may not be regarded as detrimental.

One of them is the adaptation of place names of all feature categories to the current orthography, while names of populated places frequently preserve outdated writings. Another is the recognition of new names, e.g. for urban quarters or also rural regions, if new community structures have emerged not in line with the traditional coinciding with inherited place names. Thus, the brand of a tourist region may not without justification become the standard name of this region, if this name gets into popular local use and meets also other standardization criteria. It may also happen that compactly settling migrant communities in urban areas develop after some generations their own toponymy and let the question arise, why this is not be officially recognized in addition to the inherited implemented by the former dominant population of this area. These examples could be continued leading to the principal question: Why should we deny every new generation the right of naming according to their own cultural disposition and perception of geographical space, when we agree on regarding place naming as a basic human attitude.

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