It occurred to me only today that there is actually one country in the Francophone world that is a bit like India, renaming its cities and insisting the former colonialist should use them, and that's... Madagascar. Here, French media usually tend to use the new Malagasy names (which are just basically the same as the traditional French names, but in a purely Malagasy spelling), which usually leads to people pronouncing the names of these cities horribly badly. Personally I tend to prefer using the traditional French names, which are closer in pronunciation to how these cities are pronounced by people in Madagascar (that's only natural, since the French didn't come up with some invented names, except for two minor colonial cities, Fort Dauphin and Ile Sainte Marie, but basically just reproduced with French spelling the sounds that they heard the natives pronouncing). This is particularly a problem in Malagasy, whose spelling includes many syllables that are almost not pronounced, making for impossibly long words if you pronounced everything "as is written".
The French spelling is closer to the contracted pronunciation of Malagasy people. So for example the capital city is now "Antananarivo", whereas the French name (which I personally still use, but which French media tend not to use anymore) is "Tananarive", and "Tananarive" is much closer in pronunciation to how the natives really pronounce "Antananarivo". Tananarive is in fact often shortened as "Tana", which is how most expats and many natives call it.
The main port of Madagascar, "Tamatave" in French, is now "Toamasina" in Malagasy which the government of Madagascar wants us to use now. French media seem to hesitate between Tamatave and Toamasina.
Today I was reading an article in Le Figaro, containing this sentence (parentheses theirs): "Voilà une semaine que la gare de Soarana, à Antananarivo (Tananarive), est bloquée à 9h43 [...] la RN 7, route emblématique construite à l'époque coloniale, reliant Antananarivo à Toliara (Tuléar)."
Honestly, among those who know Madagascar, I've only ever heard "Tuléar", which sounds way better than "Toliara" anyway. I've never heard "Toliara", wouldn't know where it is or what it is if someone said that word to me, and if Malagasy people pronounced the name of that city, it would anyway sound much closer to "Tuléar" than to "Toliara".
Another example is "Majunga", which is officially "Mahajanga" in Malagasy (first time I see that "Mahajanga" spelling, I had to check it online). Majunga is more beautiful sounding, and well known in France (think of the Majunga Tower at La Défense for example).
As for the old colonial names, such as Fort-Dauphin, or Diego-Suarez, they are still used a lot by the tourism industry (Diego-Suarez is an idyllic beach destination), both because they are more well known than their Malagasy equivalents, and also because they convey a sense of history, culture and exoticism that their Malagasy official equivalents do not convey for Francophone audiences.
Checking Google Maps, I see that they use the traditional French names for the capital city, for Tuléar and for Majunga, but not for other cities (Toamasina instead of Tamatave here), which is inconsistent. How is it with Google maps in Anglophone Canada?
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