Tamil Nadu withdraws order renaming 1000+ locations after citizens' red-hot 'feedback'

The Tamil Nadu government has taken back its order of replacing the Anglicised versions of Tamil names of over a 1,000 localities in the state. Minister for Tamil Official Language and Tamil Culture, Pandiarajan K said the government is working on alignment of views by experts on transliteration standards and will release it again in two or three days with necessary changes after absorbing feedback. He said the government order (GO) which was issued last week for the change of names of places has been withdrawn.

"We are working on alignment of views by experts on Transliteration standards from Tamil to English. Hopefully, we should get this released in 2/3 days. The GO on the change of English names for Tamil names for places has been withdrawn. Will absorb all feedback & reissue shortly," Pandiarajan tweeted after a backlash by netizens.

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Name change as per actual pronunciation

The Tamil Nadu government has changed the spellings/names of 1,018 places in the state closer to their Tamil origin as their current names are anglicised. The initiative was taken by the Tamil Development Ministry in the year 2018 and many Tamil linguistic experts along with the district administration were part of this work to change the names of the districts/areas to have the exact Tamil sound while pronounced in English. 

The Tamil Nadu government decided to change the names because the English spelling of the names were not as per the actual pronunciation of the names in Tamil. This is because the British colonial rulers couldn't pronounce the names properly hence they formed convenient versions or pronunciations of the names, which the government intended to change to the original. Netizens who first criticised the decision after the names were out, praised the minister for halting the GO and rethinking over it by taking the necessary feedback.

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The government had also faced criticism for releasing such a GO during the time of the pandemic where all the departments are busy in combatting the coronavirus situation in the state.

The people of the state were earlier quite supportive of the move earlier, but they didn't seem to quite like the newly anglicised versions of the names after their release. For example, Coimbatore was to be converted to Koyampuththoor, Vellore as Veeloor and Dindigul as Thindukkalamong among others. Some of these new names include- Ambattur - Ampaththoor, Nagercoil - Nagerkovil, Tuticorin - Thoothukkudi, Karur - Karoor, Vepery - Vepperi, Saidapet - Saidapettai, Alandur - Aalandhoor, Mylapore - Mayilappoor, which are invariably harder to spell.