Names for Countries on the Map

On the map the name for Finland is “Suomi” which is the Finnish name for the bilingual Finnish-Swedish country. The Swedish and international name for the country is Finland. Shouldn’t the name on the map then be “Finland / Suomi” first the international then the Finnish name? That is the case for other multilingual countries like Swiss, Belgium. This could be posted on the Finland forum, but as this is a matter also for the international policy I post it here.

The “name” tag is meant to contain common name, not international one (which has specific “int_name” tag). Most of the time common name is easy to find (like “Polska”), but there are many corner cases, including multilingual countries and there is no one way how to solve it. Belgium has one way (all the languages versions), India has another (only common English name).

So while the problem is generic, I think this should be resolved at the country level.

Well - sort of. I made the mistake when I first visited Finland as part of a work trip around all the Nordic countries of trying to get by in Finland with “food and beer essentials” in Swedish rather than Finnish. Big mistake - back then (around 30 years ago) although street names were bilingual you wouldn’t hear Swedish spoken in Helsinki other than by Swedish visitors (obviously the Åland Islands would be another matter).

kocio is spot on with the answer though - it’s a question for the Finnish OSM community what value they want in the “name” tag for the country etc. All the other names are there of course, so if someone wanted to make a map of Finland showing Swedish names, or a combination it’d be easy to do - although some of the resulting strings (e.g. “Eteläinen Rautatiekatu / Södra Järnvägsgatan” for https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/52915321 ) might not fit on the map!

I think it could, but there’s a major difference in the sizes of the communities, and how they are linked together to form the country. Apparently, even though the Swedish language is an official language of Finland, the community is small. In Switzerland and Belgium, the communities are not only significant, but also territorial, in that some territory has an official languages, and the official languages of those countries is nothing but the sum of the official languages of those territories.

Maybe there’s a territory/region in Finland which is totally Swedish speaking - if that’s the case then it’d make sense to add the Swedish name of the country in the “name=” tag. But I’m afraid this would be the start of a never-ending minority games considering almost every European country has linguistic minorities. Even in the cases where those communities are territorial, such as the German-speaking minority in Italian South-Tyrol, the language is a co-official language with Italian. In Belguim and Switzerland this is not the case - there are places withing those countries where only French or only German or only Dutch is an official language for instance. Those countries never tried to be nation-states and force people to assimilate - as opposed to most other European countries who did that at some point in their history.