Chattogram/Chittagong

The England Cricket team is playing a series of One-Day matches in Bangladesh, and the next one is in the city of… Chattogram? Which I know of only under the old English spelling of Chittagong. And oddly enough there appears to be an official site in the Bangladesh National portal about the Chattogram district with the URL chittagong.gov.bd and another with the URL www.chittagongdiv.gov.bd. The name change appears to have been made official in 2018, so if after five years they haven’t managed to change the URLs, I suspect the change hasn’t really taken.

I do find it interesting when the preferred English spelling of place names changes—my knowledge of geography is terrible and I tend to know city names from writing, rather than maps, so I often don’t remember that, for instance, Chennai is the same place as Madras, or for that matter that Lemberik is the same place as Lviv (or Lvov). It’s worse when I don’t have a sense of how a name is pronounced by the locals—I assume that Beijing is closer to the common local pronunciation than Peking was, but that’s an assumption. And I really have no idea how the name of that Bangladeshi city is pronounced locally.

Still, there is it: Chattogram. My word processor puts up a wavy red flag, and definitely prefers that I use the older spelling.

Thanks,
-Ed.

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