A proposal for a modern multilingual gazetteer for the Portuguese-speaking countries

Abstract

A recently enforced orthographic agreement for Portuguese ended a century-long linguistic standardization divide within Portuguese-speaking countries. Over the past few years, for the first time ever, the development of shared language tools for all CPLP countries has been in progress. This includes the first standardized common toponymic resource, Vocabulário Toponímico (VT). But what about other languages sharing their space with Portuguese? Official toponymy in the CPLP space is pervasively recorded only in Portuguese, and in Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau and Timor-Leste, for instance, the most widely spoken languages are all but absent from gazetteers and place-name signs, perhaps by virtue of those languages largely sharing their lexical base with Portuguese. In this paper we address the conundrum of developing the first common normative toponymic resource for many Portuguese-speaking countries. We share arguments as to why it can be used as an adequate model for the toponymic codification of other languages spoken in the CPLP, as a common toponymic data platform and, from there, as a tool that can be used to strengthen linguistic diversity.