Derry City in Northern Ireland is also known as Londonderry by a significant percentage of the populace. The nomenclature is largely divided on religious lines. Nowadays in compromise in official literature it is called Derry-Londonderry. Some local wags call it Slash City. Are there many other examples of towns or cities local people cannot agree on a name for?
Wikipedia compromises by making Derry the city and Londonderry the county.
Does the case where the common people have a different name than the “official” name count? There are many towns in the US which have a weird official name, like Gerlach-Empire, NV. I’ve never heard anyone refer to it as anything but “Gerlach” or “that place near Burning Man.”
A big example is South Los Angeles. You can probably guess where that is, but haven’t heard anything about it. That’s because everyone knows it as South Central, but a couple of years back the euphemized it, as if that will fix everything.
My ancestors got an "assisted " passage from Londonderry to Australia. What about St. Petersburg which seems to change its name every now and then?
I doubt it counts, unless there’s a significant chunk of the populace who still call it Leningrad/Petrograd.
The name is so contentious for some that road signs get vandalised 
.
If vandalised road signs count, about any place in bilingual areas of Spain; most people are perfectly happy with bilingualism so long as we all make an effort to meet halfway, but there’s idiots on both sides who insist in imposing their language, or even their dialect. People can’t even agree on the spelling in one of those languages, sometimes: for example, apparently someone in Aoiz doesn’t like seeing it called Agoitz in Basque, as he keeps painting over the t in official signs; you can see the Basque name of Pamplona spelled Iruña, Irunea, or even Iruna.
India has had several cities change their names recently, largely from the Anglicised spelling to something more approximating what the name sounds like in local languages.
So we have:
Bombay -> Mumbai
Calcutta -> Kolkata
Madras -> Chennai
Trivandrum -> Thiruvanathapuram
Bangalore -> Bengaluru
In most cases, both names get used, depending on the language being spoken and how fervently patriotic the person is, but clearly the old names are gradually dying away.
Istanbul was Constantinople.
Plenty of those around here. For instance, there’s the West Bank town that Jews know as **Shechem **and Arabs know as **Nablus **- the first name after the ancient Hebrew city, and the second after the Roman town of Neapolis that was built on its ruins.
My wife’s hometown in north Wales has an “official” English name, as well as a Welsh name that locals use.
I got quite confused the first time I visited when she asked the taxi driver to take us home and gave the Welsh name for the town (which I’d never heard before).
The names are not etymologically related - i.e. the English name is not a corruption of the Welsh name - they are totally separate roots.
edit
Wikipedia lists a few others.
Gatineau, across the Ottawa River from the city of Ottawa is a close approximation of this.
The city was originally known as Hull, but it was amalgamated with several smaller towns about 10 years ago to form one municipal administration. Although Hull was the largest of the amalgamated cities the new name became Gatineau, after one of the smaller towns.
A lot of the English speaking in the region still refer to the city as Hull, and of course the French speaking people prefer Gatineau.
This is nowhere near as contentious an issue as Londonderry though. I lived in Londonderry for 3 years as a kid. Do they still have segregated Protestand and Catholic neighbourhoods, or are they more integrated now?
I understand the locals still refer to Ho Chi Minh City as Saigon.
Protestant, obviously. Missed the edit window.
Do people in Yangon still call it Rangoon?
These seem like really different categories:
- Bilingual, where it isn’t so much disagreement as language choice (even if, as in Nava’s example, some people want to remove the choice): “Mold” vs. “Yr Wyddgrug” (Or “Derry” vs. “Doire.”)
- Nicknames that are most often abbeviations of the official names, as: Really long descriptive Spanish phrase > “Los Angeles” > “L.A.”
- Imposed / new official names that are rejected by (some / most) of the people (“South Central” vs. whatever-the-new-name is)
“Londonderry” seems to be in category #3, with politics as the deciding factor of whether people use the official name or not.
There was a little old lady who said she had been born in St Petersburg, grown up in Petrograd, lived all her married life in Leningrad and suddenly at old age was back in St Petersburg again and had lived in the same flat the whole time.
We don’t have too many of these in the United States. The main thing we seem to disagree on naming is Civil War battles.
Gatineau was the larger city in terms of population (according to Wikipedia, 102,898 vs. 66,246 in 2001), at least in part because it had been previously amalgamated during the 1970s. But it was a suburban city while Hull was more of a central city and was generally considered as such, though both were basically suburbs of Ottawa economically speaking, especially since the public sector became the main industry in the region. And I’d say that it was mostly residents of Hull who wanted the new city to be named Hull, while residents of Gatineau wanted it named Gatineau, independently of what language they speak. (Both Gatineau and Hull were after all mainly French-speaking cities; the English-speaking population is mostly found in Aylmer, yet another smaller city that was incorporated in the new Gatineau.)
If someone refers to the amalgamated city of Gatineau as “Hull”, it’s probably because they’re not from the region and used to think of Hull as the central city. Others do as I do: still use the 1980-2000 city names for geographical references, but use Gatineau when speaking of the municipal administration.
There is a village in Northern Sweden that changed name some time in the 50s because the people there didn’t like the old one, which was Kräkångersnoret. It is a descriptive name composed of three words: kräk, meaning sharp bend, ånger (or anger), bay, and nor, cape. In other words The cape by the sharp bend in the bay.
The reason people wanted to change the name is because it could also be thought of as a composite of kräk, scoundrel or possibly puke, ånger, remorse, and snor, snot. People have no sense of humour.
I don’t think this is “clear” at all. People in Varanasi still use the name “Banaras,” some 60 years after the change. In casual speech, I have found “Calcutta” and “Bombay” much more common when people are speaking English.