Current trends in changing official American toponyms

Geographic features, such as streams and summits, have official names that are recorded by the United States government, and citizens can submit proposals to officially change one of these names. Name change proposals to the government from 2017 and 2018 were analyzed to understand different factors that contribute to modern naming practices. Various elements from each proposal were categorized and recorded so that numerical analysis could show why proposals are submitted, what features are in most proposals, what kinds of names are suggested, and what naming choices imply about American people in general. Each proposal also includes the latitude and longitude coordinates of its specific geographic feature. This detail allowed all the features from the name change proposals to be mapped in ArcGIS Online, and spatial analysis was done on the different categories recorded for each feature. The results of these different studies are discussed, along with what their implications might be and what areas could be further studied in the future.