SeelingCat
Prince
I'm always happy to see effort put into giving cities their endonymic names, especially for indigenous civs - the Inca in Civ 6 were a nice standout in this regard. I may be a bit biased though given my modding work lol.
I think what guides city names in most cases is the use of "Wikipedia Standard," which was mentioned in a Paradox dev diary as being used because it's a sort of neutral, accessible name. Obviously, Civ does not take this as a hard and fast rule, though, as we can see deviations for indigenous civs (Qusqu vs Cuzco/Cusco), ancient civs (Swenett vs Aswan), and cities that have changed names historically (Thăng Long vs Hanoi; Tskhumi vs Sukhumi).
But conversely, these trends are not consistent either: the Maya have Palenque, not Lakamha; Nubia has Musawwarat es-Sufra instead of Aborepi; and Japan uses Tokyo instead of Edo. I think it's a mix of trying to promote immersion while also trying to capture the familiarity of recognizable names. ("Does Aswan sound like it would exist in Ancient Egypt?", "Will people recognize Palenque more?", "Will we get questions about why Tokyo isn't on the Japanese city list?")
I think overall Firaxis has gotten better at representing local names, and also is making more use of diacritics and special characters as font support/tech has developed (although they still don't like letters with dots like Ḥ yet...) - and excited to see how the cities in Civ7 appear!
I think what guides city names in most cases is the use of "Wikipedia Standard," which was mentioned in a Paradox dev diary as being used because it's a sort of neutral, accessible name. Obviously, Civ does not take this as a hard and fast rule, though, as we can see deviations for indigenous civs (Qusqu vs Cuzco/Cusco), ancient civs (Swenett vs Aswan), and cities that have changed names historically (Thăng Long vs Hanoi; Tskhumi vs Sukhumi).
But conversely, these trends are not consistent either: the Maya have Palenque, not Lakamha; Nubia has Musawwarat es-Sufra instead of Aborepi; and Japan uses Tokyo instead of Edo. I think it's a mix of trying to promote immersion while also trying to capture the familiarity of recognizable names. ("Does Aswan sound like it would exist in Ancient Egypt?", "Will people recognize Palenque more?", "Will we get questions about why Tokyo isn't on the Japanese city list?")
I think overall Firaxis has gotten better at representing local names, and also is making more use of diacritics and special characters as font support/tech has developed (although they still don't like letters with dots like Ḥ yet...) - and excited to see how the cities in Civ7 appear!