Parker, Martin2026-03-192026-03-192010-021175-3099https://hdl.handle.net/10289/18110The New Zealand Geographic Board recently revealed that the two main islands of Aotearoa/New Zealand have never been officially named. The revelation made both national and international news and led to a large number of publicly aired comments on the matter, suggesting that something so fundamental and seemingly innocuous as naming is in fact likely to generate a good deal of controversy, no more so than in a bicultural/bilingual context. This paper will examine the phenomenon of naming from a number of angles. After discussing a layperson’s idea of what is meant by the meaning of names, we shall attempt to apply a number of theoretical models from the field of Language Philosophy to the case of the main islands of Aotearoa/New Zealand: the Descriptivist approach of Frege and Russell, Kripke’s Rigid Designators, and Causal Grounding theory. We shall conclude that, in the case of applying the first two of these, there is a question mark over whether any of the current names for the two islands, both Māori and Pākehā, are in fact names at all; in terms of applying the theory of Causal Grounding, we are drawn to the conclusion that in history lies the key to the future.enAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/New ZealandGeographic namesIslandsMāori namesTheoryIngoa MāoriIngoa wāhiPolitics of languageJournal Article10.15663/K10.141933021-5668