Change and Continuity: Colonial and Contemporary Toponyms of Singapore's Offshore Islands

This study expands the existing research on toponymy in Singapore by focusing on the many offshore islands that form an inalienable component of the landscape of the Lion City. Diverging from more micro reconstruction-based toponymic approaches, the analysis adopts a critical toponomastics framework, placing emphasis on the interaction between the use and maintenance of toponyms and the wider socio-political context. Acknowledging the complex past of Singapore’s becoming, the period of British colonial rule forms the basis in which contemporary toponyms are treated in the study. Both old and newly reclaimed offshore islands are considered, and this article ultimately finds Singapore’s toponymic landscape to have remained relatively stable. The stasis does not represent a lack of development, for it instead reveals that the unchanging naming practices are in fact responses to socio-political contexts diachronically unveiled between colonial and contemporary Singapore. Situating toponomastics within the wider development of Singapore as the post-colonial nation it is today, this paper reveals how the landscape has sought to cement social, economic, and political goals.