Bhubaneswar: In a significant move aimed at preserving linguistic identity and ensuring phonetic accuracy, the Odisha government on Monday issued a notification through the Revenue & Disaster Management Department to standardise the English spellings of administrative place names across the state in alignment with Odia pronunciation.
The revised spellings will apply to districts, sub-divisions, tahasils, blocks, municipalities, NACs, and other urban local bodies. The initiative seeks to ensure that English transliterations of place names more accurately reflect their pronunciation in Odia, while also maintaining cultural and linguistic consistency.
Clarifying the scope of the decision, the government stated that the changes are strictly orthographic in nature and do not alter the actual names or identities of any administrative units. The notification emphasised that the revised spellings only replace existing English versions and should not be interpreted as renaming of places.
As part of the exercise, several place names have been standardised. For instance, “Cuttack” has been revised as “Kataka,” “Balasore” as “Baleshwar,” and “Bolangir” as “Balangir.” Similarly, Angul will be spelled as “Anugola,” Bargarh as “Baragada,” and Sundargarh as “Sundaragada.”
