Background and purpose

During the debates of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in 1948, the problem of standardization of geographical names was raised, particularly with regard to cartographic services. Impetus from the First Regional Cartographic Conference for Asia and the Pacific in 1955 led to ECOSOC resolution 715A (XXVII) requesting the Secretary General:

a. To provide encouragement and guidance to those nations which had no national organization for the standardization and coordination of geographical names to establish such an organization and to produce national gazetteers at an early date;

b. To take the necessary steps to ensure the functions of a central clearing-house for geographical names, including:

• the collection of gazetteers; and
• the collection and dissemination of information concerning the technical procedures adopted by Member States for standardization of domestic names, and concerning the techniques and systems used by each Member State in the transliteration of the geographical names of other countries.

The Secretary General was also requested to set up a small group of experts to consider technical problems of domestic standardization. Resulting from this meeting at UNHQ in June 1960 and further government consultations, ECOSOC approved the decision to convene a UN Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names in Geneva in 1967. After a second conference in 1972, the ad hoc experts group was formalized as the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN), to carry forward the programme of cooperation between conferences. Today, UNGEGN is one of the seven standing expert bodies of ECOSOC.

Nine conferences and twenty-four sessions of UNGEGN have been held since 1967.

The United Nations Conference on the standardization of geographical names, convened every five years, continues to provide a forum:

• to encourage national and international geographical names standardization;
• to promote the international dissemination of nationally standardized geographical names information; and
• to adopt single romanization systems for the conversion of each non-Roman writing system to the Roman alphabet.