Rather than spend lots of energy exploring the spelling politics of various towns in various countries, it might be easier to look for a common pattern. There are two possible approaches: 1. Spell city names by the "local language rule" 2. Spell city names by the "English language convention". In other words, as the name is most likely to appear in an English language newspaper or magazine article. zone.tab right now does the latter. In fact, you don't really have much choice; it needs to be #2. #1 works if there is a single official (or widely accepted) spelling, and that spelling can reasonably be rendered in the character set used in zone.tab. (I think that's plain ASCII, as in ISO 646.) If there's more than one official language, there's a definite problem. For example, zone.tab says "Europe/Brussels" which is the English language form of the name of Belgium's capital. If you wanted to use approach #1 (local language rule) you would *have* to have two entries (Europe/Brussel and Europe/Bruxelles) because local language politics there can get quite heated and listing only one of the two is very much unacceptable. Switzerland has four official languages. I don't know how to render Europe/Zurich in all of them. If you use the local language of the town, you have to put an umlaut on that u. So to get back to Calcutta, or Delhi: you can't very well put the local spelling of the name in zone.tab unless you're using the local script. (Which one would that be -- India has at least six.) Or you could use the official translateration into the latin alphabet, if there's a plausible transliteration. But that wouldn't work for European languages that use diacritical marks and have no standard way of doing without them (German does, but I don't think Rumanian does, so how would you render the local version of Rumania's capital?). Conclusion: stick with #2, which means stick with "Calcutta" (or "Delhi") unless and until a different spelling becomes generally accepted for English language documents. paul