The in places
The word is such an inoffensive little word that it is hard to see why it should cause problems at all. But it does. There is a big difference between Do you like coffee? and Do you like the coffee?.
Some languages, such as Finnish and Russian, have nothing corresponding to
the, and speakers of those languages have difficulty learning how to use the in English, but even those of us who have learnt another language which does have a word we translate as the will know that it is not always used in the same way as the English word is.
Here I want to consider the way the is used in place names. All names, including place names, are definite, whether they have a definite article the or not:
Auckland and The Hague both refer to equally definite locations. But in most cases, phrases with the are fundamentally descriptions, while those without it are names.
The Friendly Islands is a description of the islands, and The Isle of Man contains some extra information to tell it apart from other isles, such as The Isle of Wight.
Stewart Island, in contrast, is a name. The trouble with this explanation is that definite descriptions merge into names when they are used as labels for places.
New Zealand is unusual in having a number of such labels which we can choose, apparently at random, to use as names or descriptions. Otago is a name (we cannot have The Otago) and The West Coast is a description (we cannot have West Coast without a the). But we can
have Waikato or The Waikato, Hawke’s
Bay or The Hawke’s Bay, Wairarapa or The Wairarapa, and nobody knows why or can point to any distinction.
This variation is unusual. Perhaps the best we can say is that some place names come with a the and some come without it, and you just have to know which is which. But it sounds weird if you start using the wrong one.
Which is why it is so odd to hear some of these expressions routinely misused in our broadcast media. For example, what
used to be called The Solomon Islands
(and still is on the door of their high commission in Wellington) is often called
Solomon Islands.
Why wouldn’t it be like The Shetland Islands, The Cook Islands, The Channel
Islands or The Canary Islands? There seems to be no linguistic reason for the omission of The in The Solomon Islands, though Britannica says its the was officially dropped in 1975 – perhaps in the lead-up to independence.
There is less reason for the omission of
The in The Chatham Islands. Yet RNZ National’s forecasters seem less and less inclined to use it. Even less explicably, they have apparently decided that Central
High Country is the name of a particular area of the North Island and not just a description, and use it with no the. Perhaps to make up for this, TVNZ’s
Breakfast has started to insert a The in Cook Strait, which is a name, and so does not need any the at all.
It was once the case that you could tell visitors to New Zealand because they said North Island and South Island instead of
The North Island and The South Island.
Even this shibboleth is no longer sacrosanct. New Zealanders now use both. The language is changing as people in the public eye omit or insert the at the fancy of the speaker.
Laurie Bauer taught at Victoria for
40 years. He is the author of more than
20 books on language topics, and winner of the 2017 Royal Society of New Zealand’s Humanities/Aronui medal.