Nauru’s parliament has passed, without opposition, a proposal to rename the island nation Naoero, setting up a referendum on whether the change should become official. If voters approve, the country of about 13,000 people would restore the name its own language has long used.
The push has an immediate political weight because it is no longer just a speech or a symbolic idea. President David Adeang laid the case in January, saying the switch would “more faithfully honour our nation’s heritage, our language, and our identity,” and lawmakers have now moved it one step closer to reality. The island is 21 sq km in size and sits about 3,000km north-east of Australia, where a formal name change would be felt well beyond the Pacific.
Nauru’s history helps explain why the issue has resurfaced now. The island was christened Pleasant Island in 1798, Germany annexed it in 1888, and Australia took primary administration in 1919 under a League of Nations mandate, keeping the Nauru spelling that carried through independence in 1968. The government says the older Indigenous name was not rejected by choice but set aside for convenience, after foreign tongues could not properly pronounce it.
That argument sits uneasily beside the new campaign to restore it. The government itself has pointed to Türkiye and Eswatini as examples of countries that changed their official names to better reflect local language, and cited Chuuk, which was widely known as Truk until 1990. The broader cause is familiar to anyone who has watched decolonisation unfold in place names: changing what appears on the map is also a way of deciding whose history gets carried forward.
That is why the next step matters more than the vote in parliament. A referendum will decide whether Naoero becomes the country’s official name, but no date has been given and no threshold has been set out publicly. For now, Nauru has crossed from proposal to test case, with its own people left to decide whether the name they use at home should finally be the one the world sees.
