Social agents often stake claims to the naming operations that are embedded in official discourse. This paper examines the metapragmatics of such investments. Drawing on post-Austinian naming theories (Kripke, Harris, Bourdieu, Silverstein), the paper assays the controversial process of naming roads in a rural community in Sweden. In this process, one major stake was the entextualisation of names in Övdalsk, a locally used form of Scandinavian. Centering on an extended exchange over spatial and linguistic authenticity, the paper clarifies various ways in which the semiotics of place are bound up with a range of symbolic struggles and antagonisms. More generally, the paper asserts that such focus is required for understanding the semiotisation of space and spatialisation of semiosis.