Abstract
It is not unthinkable that in a not too distant future, citizens of Oslo will have the opportunity to meet for appointments at Salimi Square, to shop for vegetables in Kharian Street, to enjoy their picnics in Rubina Rana Park and to drive to the nearby town of Drammen on Mogadishu Road.
 Historical change may lead to politically motivated changes in place names, although often slow and uneven, and major upheavals such as revolutions tend to entail a total renovation of the names of streets, parks and other urban fixtures. The names of towns and villages tend to stick more stubbornly.
 This short essay looks at these three modes, drawing on exam- ples from Tehran, Trinidad and Toronto, eventually relating them ten- tatively to the emergent multiethnic reality in Oslo and the future prospects for place names in the city.
Highlights
It is not unthinkable that in a not too distant future, citizens of Oslo will have the opportunity to meet for appointments at Salimi Square, to shop for vegetables in Kharian Street, to enjoy their picnics in Rubina Rana Park and to drive to the nearby town of Drammen on Mogadishu Road
While semantics has a long history in social anthropology and related disciplines, and personal names have been studied by Alford (1988), Geertz (1973) and others, the semantics of place names has rarely been studied by anthropologists or other social scientists interested in identification
Perhaps this is because the issues of place names may superficially appear to be irrelevant to social processes
Summary
It is not unthinkable that in a not too distant future, citizens of Oslo will have the opportunity to meet for appointments at Salimi Square, to shop for vegetables in Kharian Street, to enjoy their picnics in Rubina Rana Park and to drive to the nearby town of Drammen on Mogadishu Road. (Salimi is the family name of two siblings originally from Lahore, Khalid and Fakhra, who have pioneered antiracism and cosmopolitan values in Norway since the late 1970s; Kharian is the area in Pakistani Punjab where most of Norway’s more than 30,000 Pakistani immigrants originate; Rubina Rana, a PakistaniNorwegian woman, was the first non-white Norwegian to chair the 17 May (Constitution Day) committee in Oslo.) resistance to such changes can be stubborn and vehement, as witnessed in the many unsuccessful initiatives over the years to have a street or small square in Oslo named after Knut Hamsun, one of the country’s finest novelists and a man widely seen as a traitor to the nation because of his open sympathies for the German occupying forces during the Second World War. Historical change may eventually lead to change in place names, this need not happen, and if it does, it is normally the work of a megalomaniac dictator or the grinding machinery of local politics, and major upheavals such as revolutions tend to entail a total renovation of the names of streets, parks and other urban fixtures.
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