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Due to a large number of political events, certain city names have become politically incorrect and have been changed. Not all the locals like it though. A Soviet-era joke has an older Russian filling out a form:
Where were you born? St. Petersburg. Where did you go to school? Petrograd. Where do you live now? Leningrad. And where would you like to live? St. Petersburg.
It's not always for political reasons though - some Chinese place names have simply been changed due to a new method of transliterating their "real" names - neither "Peking" nor "Beijing" is an entirely accurate way or representing the Chinese word, but the new version is closer ("Payching" would be closer than either).
Notable examples:
- Mumbai: Formerly Bombay.
- Kolkata: Formerly Calcutta.
- Guangzhou: Formerly Canton.
- Ho Chi Minh City: Formerly Saigon, a name still used by a lot of the locals.
- And oh, how we miss Saigon.
- Cue trombone: Wah wah waaaaaahhhhh....
- Pretoria may change its name to Tshwane in the near future, but the change is controversial.
- Constantinople changed to Istanbul (Meaning just "The city"). Noone can say why they changed it, but people seem to just like it better that way.
- Besides, why it got the works is nobody's business but the Turks.
- Before it was Constantinople, it was Byzantium
- And even old New York was once New Amsterdam.
- St. Petersburg became Petrograd when WWI began (because the original name sounded German, though it actually came from Dutch. Peter the Great greatly admired that country.), then Leningrad with the rise of the Soviet Union, and reverted to St. Petersburg after its collapse.
- Similarly, Tsaritsyn became Stalingrad and after de-Stalinization in 1961 became Volgograd, though there is a civic movement to restore the Stalingrad name.
- Revolution City, a suburb of Baghdad constructed in 1959, was later renamed Saddam City after the Baathist revolution, and since the 2003 overthrow of Saddam has become known as Sadr City.
- In one example that might be considered Political Correctness Gone Mad, the name of the county in which Seattle, WA sits in was changed in 2005 from King county (named after William King, vice president of the US at the time of the county's inception), to King county (named after Martin Luther King Jr., who visited Seattle in 1961.)
- This was probably because William King's most notable political legacy before his 45-day vice presidency was defending slavery in the Senate.
- Chennai: Formerly Madras
- Beijing: Formerly Peking (A change in Romanization, not the actual official Chinese name)
- Ballarat in Victoria, Australia was officially named Sandhurst in the 19th century. However, all attempts to use "Sandhurst" failed and the government eventually gave up and let it be known as Ballarat.
- Kitchener, Ontario received a new name in 1916 (the middle of World War One), when enough people complained about a Canadian city named "Berlin".
- More benignly, German-named places in Australia had their names changed during the war (in 1917) as well. Some changed back (like Hahndorf, SA, which temporarily became Ambleside), others didn't (Blumburg became Birdwood, SA)
- Of course the prize probably goes to the main city of the western Ukraine: Lemberg -> Lwów -> Львов (L'vov) -> Львів (L’viv) within less than ninety years.
- There used to be a US town called Swastika.
- Several cities in Poland, due to the border changing several times in the 20th Century:
- Ditto for East Prussia, now part of Russia: "Königsberg" (meaning "King's mount") became "Kaliningrad", ie "Kalinin City", named after the figurehead president of the USSR Mikhail Kalinin.
- Several African and Asian cities/countries adopted more "Local" sounding names after the British left.
- Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia became Harare in Zimbabwe.
- Northern Rhodesia became Zambia, though the major city was already Kampala.
- Butterworth in Malaysia became Penang.
- The Belgian Congo became Zaire after gaining independence, but reverted to "Democratic Republic of the Congo" in 1998.
- Bechuanaland became Botswana. In The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency TV adaptation Grace references this when complaining the office does not have a computer.
- Most place names in Ireland are anglicisations of the original Irish names. Although still referred to by their English names, towns and villages today have signs at the entrances that give both the Irish and English placenames.
- Around the time of the formation of the Irish Free State, Kingstown and Queenstown were renamed Dun Laoghaire and Cobh. King's county and Queen's county were renamed County Offaly and County Laois.
- The Greek island of Lesbos may be getting a name change soon, if only for the fact that people who live there won't have to be called Lesbians.
- Though, of course, that is where the name came from originally.
- This town
 has been contemplating a name change, at least in part because Anglophone tourists keep stealing the town sign.
- There used to be an area in Texas called "Dead Nigger Creek," which was eventually changed to the ever-so-slightly less offensive "Dead Negro Draw."
- During the 1890s, the U.S. Postal Service began standardizing spellings by dropping the "h" from town names ending in -burgh; this policy relented in The Fifties and many communities have claimed their "h" back. It can take decades for all the signs to change, however.
- Rare fictional example; Naruto 's hometown is called "Konoha" in the English manga and "(Hidden) Leaf Village" in the anime dub; the other ninja villages are treated similarly.
- Chemnitz, Germany was called Karl-Marx-Stadt from 1952 to 1990. No prizes for guessing what part of Germany it's in.
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