(asking for community input yet again per this post)
Recently, I’ve been scrolling through the map and realized that numerous areas in the United States that don’t speak English have their name=* tags in English. Namely (no pun intended), I’m referring to the state of Hawaii and Native American reservations.
For context: These places use another language (usually their native) as their main language. English is sometimes used as their main language (alongside their native one(s)), but that’s only because English is the most spoken language in the United States.
Hawai’i is most certainly not monolingual in Hawaiian, so either spelling as the top level name for the admin region is justifiable.
Individual businesses should follow the general guidance: look at the signs for which language is more prominent and make that the primary name tag, with language suffixes for the alternates.
If it’s justifiable to use either spelling as you claim, then I think this discussion should be forwarded to the Hawaii/Hawai’i local community for consensus (I need unanimous approval). (Are there any Native American mappers in OSM?)
Most of the Native names on reservations were added by a non-Native who was making bold assumptions. They were infodumping whatever they could find or infer about Native languages in the Internet onto the map as if they spoke hundreds of unrelated languages fluently. They didn’t.
Some of us are have been cleaning up the most egregious mistakes as we discover them. In some cases, we can replace one name or orthography with another using street-level imagery or published sources, while in other cases, we unfortunately have to remove the erroneous name pending more information. This effort is becoming more difficult over time as possible misinformation spreads out across the Internet from OSM and Wikipedia.
The most important thing to understand is that Native Americans are not a monolith. They are as diverse as the peoples of any continent. Each people has its own history and viewpoint on language usage. From what I understand, some groups are eager to see as much translated into their language as possible, while others are more sensitive about data sovereignty and consider Native toponyms to be more private.
You have the right idea about wanting to reach out to Native people about the names, but be careful not to generalize too much. If you’re wondering about a specific reservation, let’s discuss it individually, to see if there’s any ambiguity and figure out how to resolve it.
In the specific case of Hawaii, there might be a strong case for spelling it the Hawaiian way. Hawaiian is an official language alongside English. Hawaii isn’t the only state that has official languages besides English. However, in Hawaii, the ʻokina is increasingly used in official place names at the federal and state levels, mostly on natural features that don’t correspond to administrative units. On the other hand, U.S. state names are quite widely used as a set, so we would need to keep an eye out for downstream effects from changing the name=* of the boundary relation or place point.
I feel like changing name=* shouldn’t break things too much? There’s always name:en=Hawaii, so other English speakers can search for the state using the spelling they’re used to seeing anyway.
I actually submitted this as a punctuation error, so that the grammarchecker can spot and correct this for you. And it’s been helping millions of users for more than 4 years now!
Since I’m also a linguistics nerd, I think using the ʻokina is the most proper way to set the state’s name. In other words, name=Hawaiʻi and name:haw=Hawaiʻi.
May I respectfully suggest that you don’t do it, and leave it up to other people?
I know that sounds harsh, but there have been complaints (including only yesterday) about your remote mapping. This absolutely sounds like the sort of thing that could go wrong.
Though I am certainly haole, I lived in Hawaii for a year, so this topic is of interest to me. You have already shown your ignorance in misspelling the Hawaiian language name, which is Hawaiʻi and not Hawai’i. You’ve mixed up the ʻokina, which is a consonant in Hawaiian, pronounced as a glottal stop, with the apostrophe.
This is an apostrophe:
This is an ʻokina:
In Hawaii, both the Hawaiian spelling with the ʻokina as well as the English spelling, which omits all diacritics, including the kahakō1, are used interchangeably on the ground.
Mixing up the ʻokina and the apostrophe is an offense on the order of ordering a hot dog with ketchup in Chicago or standing on the left side of a Tube escalator in London. You won’t start a riot, but it’s wrong and shows a lack of local cultural understanding.
This particular language question is a cultural one that is steeped in colonialism and unresolved historic grievance. You are right that the Hawaiian community owns this question. Stay out of it. Even your proposed solution “forwarded to the Hawaiian community” doesn’t make sense. You didn’t even bother to post this in the United States forum…
The reason that you “need unanimous approval” is that your bulk edits have, and I’m struggling to stay within the ettiquette boundaries here, missed the mark in terms of landing within the bounds of understood community consensus. In general, if you come up with some bulk edit you want to do, I’d rather you just not ask and not do it, rather than drag the community through discussion after discussion to explain why your latest brilliant idea for a bulk edit is problematic.
Edit: just saw the comment from @Tex2002ans who beat me to pointing out the ʻokina vs apostrophe mixup!
1 A macron that appears above some vowels to indicate that it should be lengthened and stressed.
It’s very easy to want to add Native names (and similar in countries with a minority language, like Wales for example) and replace the English with them with the intention of just wanting to help. Since I don’t edit in America and don’t know much about mapping Native reservations, I will talk about my experiences with editing Wales.
It’s so important that it’s done properly. Do your research, consult the local community and especially base your edits from survey where possible.
It’s not uncommon for (usually monolingual English speaking) mappers to try and dictate multilingual tagging convention or flood areas with garbage they got from Google Translate or some article they read online and misunderstood. Adding the correct characters is also vitally important, as others have already said above. It’s also sadly very common to see names being misspelt because people omit accents (maybe they don’t know how to do it?) “Swn y Mor” doesn’t make any sense, but “Sŵn y Môr” would.
However, nonsense also exists the other way round. A now-deleted user made an absolute pig’s ear of Port Talbot a few years ago by removing English names and adding some translated Welsh, a lot of which has been fixed by now but some still outstanding because there’s no active mappers in the area to survey. The Welsh Wikipedia has some fictional translations of country names that nobody uses except for them - the sysops are very insistent on keeping them that way, and when people blindly mass-tag with names from Wikipedia/Wikidata these get dragged along, spreading misinformation.
Communities that use minority languages and/or don’t have many active mappers are not a playground nor any kind of untapped gold mine. We are so much more at risk of misinformation when it’s vital for things to be correct so we can preserve our languages and our heritage.
Now, I already said I don’t edit in America but I have seen your name crop up an awful lot with things being mass-edited and reverted. It’s not for me to decide as I don’t live there, but honestly I’d suggest you think hard about this.
Well said. The Scots Wikipedia incident did enough damage to the reputation of the Scots language, and I hope we don’t repeat this mistake on OSM with minority language communities.
I’ve ultimately decided to do nothing and leave it to the local communities to decide what should be done. I’ve only been to a few Native American reservations, where English is still used frequently on signage.
