3rd March 2015 Imagine if one day, you woke up and some leaders in your town had proposed a new name for your town to the government which was virtually unpronounceable? Well this is the real story of Luderitz where a linguistic storm is brewing. Some residents of this town are protesting plans to change the city’s name.
The new name incorporates the click like sounds used by the Nama ethnic group of Namibia in their speech; those sounds are often represented in written form with punctuation symbols. And so on keyboards, it spells out something like this !Nami#nus.
Many Luderitz residents do not care for the new name and complain that the proposed name might be bad for tourism and unrecognizable by computers and websites.
According to a resident, Crispin Clay, “Nobody’s quite certain how to pronounce or how to spell it,”
However, the government has stated that the reason for the change, is to reinforce national identitities and shed colonialism as the former name was named after German colonizer Adolf Luderitz, who killed many Nama people in his bid to colonize the city.
It’s not a done deal yet, as Presidential Affairs Minister Albert Kawana has said that the process of renaming the town is not complete yet and might take quite a while.