Opinion | Duterte’s proposal to change the Philippines’ name highlights the vexed history of place nomenclature

Philip Bowring says history complicates the choice of place names while sensitivities to certain designations seem to vary with political expediency

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President Rodrigo Duterte has suggested the Philippines change its name to Maharlika. Photo: EPA-EFE

Published: 10:32am, 17 Feb 2019Updated: 11:36am, 18 Feb 2019

President Rodrigo Duterte has suggested that the Philippines change its name. That is not quite as outrageous as many of the president’s other remarks. Indeed, it has often been said that the name, derived from the Spanish king who conquered the islands, undermines the country’s identity and helps perpetuate attitudes born of over 400 years of Spanish and then American rule. It raises wider issues, too, of how far names reflect power, not people.

The Philippines faces the problem of a suitable alternative. Some have suggested “Maharlika”, which roughly means “noble”. But that is also the lowest of the six ranks of the Philippines’ Order of Sikatuna, which is conferred on people who have rendered service to the country in the field of diplomacy. The order is itself named after the ruler of Bohol island who was a collaborator in the Spanish takeover.

History can be awkward. Perhaps a pan-Malay word reflecting the nation’s island identity would be more appropriate than Maharlika, or one related to its pre-Hispanic excellence in sailing and boat-building.

Modern names in atlases and institutes may be just lazy catch-alls. Take “Southeast Asia”, which is now in the titles of thousands of books and departments. Yet it dates only to the 1940s in English and slightly earlier in Japanese. Its subset, “maritime Southeast Asia”, is an ever vaguer chunk of geography. I have taken instead to using Nusantaria to refer to the Austronesian-speaking peoples of the islands and coasts of what are now Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia, and formerly included coastal Vietnam and Taiwan. This is a simple extension of the modern Malay word for archipelago, Nusantara, itself derived from the island and coastal realm of Java’s Majapahit empire.

Indeed, what is now Indonesia might well have been called Nusantara as independence followed years of being the Dutch East Indies. But, for whatever reason, nationalists chose a Western word formula, incorporating “nisi”, the Greek word for island, as in the case of Melanesia, Austronesia and Polynesia.