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On a long timeline, the issue of place names in South Africa can be divided into two key themes: firstly, multilingualism and the hierarchy of local languages (with arguments around their respective superiority, antecedence or operationality); secondly, the symbolic and memorial marking of the territory via icons of the various struggles in South Africa's past. Issues of language and memory overlap, and are often instrumentalised together by a given community. This paper suggests that toponymic choices deal with more than these issues of recognition and precedence between cultures and histories. Toponyms, their choice and the debates about them, reflect how specific places strive for autonomy or a new role in place hierarchy - from local to global. In turn, place hierarchy indicates the relationships between the different South African communities, also expressed in toponymy.