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Bay Area city to name street after Barack Obama

The Milpitas City Council has approved to change the name of Dixon Landing Road to Barack Obama Boulevard. The council voted 3-2 in favor of moving forward with the name change. The length of the renamed stretch has yet to be determined.

This is the first city in Santa Clara County to have a Barack Obama Blvd. It could take up to a year to get the name change done.  Council members Bob Nunez and Anthony Phan suggested the name change.

“A lot of staff work. Research and fiscal analysis. Then staff will bring back everything to us for a vote and that’s the main event,” said Phan. The reaction in the community and on social media has been divided.

Tasmanian Aboriginal community prepared for war over place-name legislation

Premier Will Hodgman says new legislation to penalise those who use place names not formally recognised as Tasmanian nomenclature will not extend to Aboriginal place names. Greens leader Cassy O’Connor asked Mr Hodgman in Parliament how the proposed legislation to worked with the government’s pledge to reset its relationship with the Aboriginal community. She said Aboriginal names attached to places had been used for thousands of years. Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre chief executive Heather Sculthorpe said the community would resist the legislation and would risk prison time if necessary. “This bill is a direct attack on Aboriginal rights to use our own language and maintain our cultural heritage,” she said.

2nd Call for Submissions: Names, Naming, Identity, and the Law

Professor I. M. Nick, Editor-in-Chief of NAMES and Immediate Past President of the American Name Society, has issued a call for book chapter proposals on the topic of Names, Naming, Identity, and the Law. This call is for chapter proposals that critically address one of the following two sub-areas:

SUB-AREA ONE: the relationship between names, naming, the law and one of the following areas of identity: gender identification, sexual orientation, ethno-racial classification, family status, political affiliation, socio-economic attainment, religious denomination; nationality and citizenship, etc.
SUB-AREA TWO: the analytical methods used by private industry and/or governmental agencies to covertly or overtly extrapolate information about name-bearers’ potential identity using onomastic data.

The focus of this publication is placed upon nations where English is used as either a national or official language. However, chapter proposals that draw comparisons with other geolinguistic areas are also welcome. Proposals may explore any type of name (e.g. personal names, place names, trade names, brand names, etc.). The intended readership for this publication is made up of university students in advanced courses (upper undergrad/grad) as well as researchers in the disciplines of linguistics, language policy, law, history, sociology, government and politics. Despite the interdisciplinary appeal of this publication, this volume is primarily intended for students and scholars in language/linguistics. Researchers are encouraged to contact Dr. Nick with any questions regarding the suitability of envisioned themes. (mavi.yaz@web.de)

Proposal Submission Deadline: January 5, 2020

The official call for papers may be downloaded here.

Demonstrations against francization of Breton toponyms

In Telgruc-sur-Mer (Finistère), more than six hundred people gathered on the beach of Trez-Bellec to protest against the francization of place names in Brittany.

“We dehumanize the territory. “This is how Armel an Hejer, a Breton artist and coordinator of Kevre Breizh, summed up the presence of several hundred demonstrators on the beach. In Telgruc-sur-Mer, the elected officials named 32 new streets solely in French. In the communes, the elected municipal officials, who are responsible for naming the places, explain that they must number and name the roads and dwellings, in particular to facilitate the work of La Poste and the emergency services.

Conference “Sacred place names in Sámi landscapes”, Tromsø, Norway, November 21-22, 2019

Place names have had a low priority in Norwegian linguistic research over the latest decades, and Sámi place names have always been a neglected field of study in all of the Sámi area. Even so, novel methods, theories, and technology have been developed that provide exciting new possibilities for interdisciplinary and comparative studies within this field. The present conference, which will be a contribution to UNs International year of indigenous languages, aims to summarize the status quo of research and requests for more knowledge about Sámi place names in the Nordic countries and North-West Russia, as well as to suggest a multidisciplinary way forward, starting with a sosioonomastic approach to Sámi sacred place names and past and present landscape use.

Registration deadline: November 1, 2019.

The 21st Finnish Conference of Onomastics, October 31 – November 1, 2019, Helsinki

Finnish Conference of Onomastics is an annual scientific event, where scholarly studies about proper names in Finland and its vicinity are presented. The conferences have been arranged since 1998. Next conference will be from October 31st to November 1st 2019 in the University of Helsinki. The program will be released here.

There will be interesting presentations in different fields of onomastics, conference dinner, choice of name of the year, and so on.

If you would like to present your paper or poster, submit your abstract by September 30, 2019 via https://elomake.helsinki.fi/forms/98562/lomake.html

Participating the conference is open and free of charge for everybody. Presentations are mainly in Finnish, but sometimes in Swedish or English.

James Bond: What is the new film going to be called?

Calling all 007 fans, the title for the much anticipated 25th James Bond film has just been revealed. And it’s…No Time to Die. The title was announced on Twitter, and producers also posted that the movie is due to come out in the UK on 3 April 2020.

What else do we know about the long-awaited film?

According to the official plot summary, the British spy comes out of retirement to take on a mission to rescue a kidnapped scientist. Filming is already underway, but there have been some problems along the way, including Daniel Craig needing minor ankle surgery after an injury on set in Jamaica. Oscar-winner Rami Malek, who starred in Bohemian Rhapsody, will play a villain.

International Workshop “The politics of place naming in Turkey”, Geneva, Switzerland, September 12-13, 2019


Research questions in this workshop include but are not limited to the following topics:

  • Promotion and erasure of toponymical repertoires;
  • Processes of Turkification & modes of resistance;
  • Ottoman, néo-Ottoman, national and post-national historiographies;
  • Actors involved in place naming: National leaders and cults of personality, role of the bureaucracy & local administrations, private sector, civil society, political parties;
  • Gender and naming policies;
  • Geographies of trauma & archaeologies of violence in the politics of naming;
  • Methodologies and sources: archives, oral history, official and alternative cartographies;
  • Labelling, marketization, commodification;
  • Technologies of power & regime change;
  • Time scales, moments of change and transition in place naming

The first day of the workshop is open to the public (program).

The second day is reserved to invited guests.

Plans for all new street names in Cardiff to avoid English

New streets in Cardiff (Wales, UK) could be given names in Welsh only under new plans.

Cardiff council said it is keen for new streets and future developments in the capital to be given names that reflect local heritage. The plans were first announced last year and council officials will make a decision whether to adopt the scheme at a meeting next month. A consultation was held over six weeks between January and March 2019. The responses will now be considered by the council’s cabinet in September. Mabli Siriol, from Welsh language group “Cymdeithas yr Iaith“, welcomed the idea. She said: “It would give a boost to the status and use of the language in the city.”