Street Naming and Odonymy in Quezon City

Abstract

This paper describes the odonymy in Quezon City (QC), Philippines. A list of 3,957 unique street names in QC is generated from the database of OpenStreetMap (OSM) and arranged into an index. From this list, the odonyms are categorized into four emerging main categories of street names: (a) Themed or Associative, (b) Eponymic or Commemorative, (c) Cultural, and (d) Descriptive. It is found that street names that were themed or had semantic associations with nearby streets were most in number at 1,691. Nearly a third (1,292) of streets in QC were eponymic or commemorated a significant person or event in the country’s history. Six hundred and twenty-nine (629) streets were related to some aspect of Philippine culture, heritage, religion, and values system. Finally, there were 345 street names that described its location or a nearby landmark. These four, along with their respective subcategories, also serve as a typology of odonyms, and thus reflect a tradition of street naming practice in QC. The overlaps in the typology and categories of odonyms are due to the polysemy of some street names and reflect the simultaneous deployment of various naming motivations and strategies by the state and private stakeholders, including political, historical, cultural, religious, ecological, and ideological considerations.