Squaw Teats*, Harney Peak, and Negrohead Creek*: A Corpus-Linguistic Investigation of Proposals to Change Official US Toponymy to (Dis)honor Indigenous US Americans

Abstract

Each year, the US Government receives hundreds of petitions to alter the official name of a geographical feature. Since the nineteenth century, the US Board on Geographic Names (USBGN) has had the task of assessing these requests with a view toward standardizing the nation’s toponymic inventory. During its decision-making, the Board seeks to maximize consistency in the formation, selection, and application of official toponyms, while minimizing potential public injury. The challenges in this regulatory balancing act are particularly apparent with regard to indigenous place names. Using an original corpus compiled from 10 years of USBGN petitions, this empirical study identified patterns in the type, motivation, and argumentation used to (dis)honor Native American identities, histories, and cultures via names and naming. After introducing the UsBGN's policies and practices, these findings are presented with several illustrative examples. The article ends by contextualizing the findings within the broader PC debate and offering future research suggestions.

Corpus Linguistic Onomastics: A Plea for a Corpus-Based Investigation of Names

“…Most corpus linguistic name studies draw on this type of analysis, that is, they analyze how often certain onomastic phenomena occur in a text corpus (e.g. Laversuch 2010;Motschenbacher 2020;Nick 2017;Oelke, Kokkinakis, and Malm 2012;Str€ om Herold and Levin 2019;van Dalen-Oskam 2012. Such an analysis provides information on the commonness of individual names, onymic affixes and name-incorporating grammatical constructions in language use.…”

Mapping Digital Discourses of the Capital Region of Finland

“…Instead, the digital data most often used in this field has taken the form of name lists varying in size and quality (see Motschenbacher 2020b). The subjects that have been addressed in these studies include the morphophonological and lexical structure of personal names (e.g., MacAulay et al 2019;Lappe 2002;Pagan 1998); combinations of descriptive appositives and proper names (Bjorge 2003); the topographical words included in place names (Nurminen 2012); surnaming patterns (Laversuch 2011); and most recently, US toponyms that mark the history of Native American peoples (Nick 2017).…”

Christian toponyms in Czechia, Poland and Slovakia

“…Because multiple interests could be competing for recognition of their particular agenda, political issues often come into play (Berg, Vuolteenaho 2009). In particular, renaming places can come with cultural and religious political implications such as in specific case studies in Israel (Cohen, Kliot 1992), Belgrade, Serbia (Rajić 2012), and the United States (Nick 2017).…”