Nauru’s parliament has approved, without opposition, a proposal to rename the country Naoero and ordered a referendum that will decide whether the new name becomes official.
The move would replace the name used internationally with Naoero, the term Nauruans use in their own language. The island is the world’s smallest republic, with an estimated population of 13,000 and just 21 square kilometres of land about 3,000 kilometres north‑east of Australia; any vote that changes the country’s name would affect its official identity, documents and global recognition if approved.
The proposal followed a speech to parliament in January by David Adeang, who urged lawmakers to adopt the Indigenous term so the nation can "more faithfully honour our nation’s heritage, our language, and our identity." Parliament approved the measure unopposed and set the question for a national referendum, though it has not announced when voters will go to the polls.
The government framed the measure with a practical explanation of how the current name entered official use. Officials say Nauru became the internationally used spelling because foreign tongues could not properly pronounce the Indigenous name, and that the spelling was adopted "not by our choice, but for convenience." They pointed to recent examples of countries and places that changed their official names — Türkiye and Eswatini among states, and Chuuk, which was widely known as Truk until 1990 — as precedents.
The longer history underlines why the change is being debated now. A British seafarer sighted the island in 1798 and christened it Pleasant Island; Germany annexed it in 1888 and the name Nauru entered official records. Australia took over primary administration under a League of Nations mandate in 1919, and the spelling Nauru continued through independence in 1968.
Scholars and advocates frame a name change as part of decolonisation. Zoltán Grossman said, "Changing placenames has been an integral part of colonialism to erase the presence of the original peoples," and added, "It’s not just about the names themselves, it’s about who has the power to change the names." Jordan Engel put the argument in terms of self‑determination: "At its core, decolonisation is about self-determination, and one of the most basic expressions of self-determination is being able to speak your language and use your ancestral placenames." Those views provide the cultural and political rationale supporters cite for asking voters to adopt Naoero.
Practical consequences are immediate if the referendum passes. Officials and outside observers note that an approved change would require updating how the country is listed in international registers and how it appears on official documents at home and abroad; for a republic of roughly 13,000 people, those administrative and diplomatic adjustments would be significant even if the change is largely symbolic for many residents.
Parliament set the referendum as the next formal step but left the central operational question open: no date has been announced. That gap — the timing of the national vote — determines how quickly a successful campaign would need to move from political endorsement to implementation and how soon citizens will be asked to confirm the shift from Nauru to Naoero.
What to watch now is narrow and concrete: when the government fixes the referendum date. Parliament has made the proposal official; the country's next clear moment will be the ballot that decides whether Nauru becomes Naoero and, if so, when the change must be carried out in passports, legal records and international listings.
