The Americas, sometimes collectively called America, are a landmass comprising the totality of North and South America. The Americas make up most of the land in Earth's Western Hemisphere and comprise the New World.
Toponymy, toponymics, or toponomastics is the study of toponyms, including their origins, meanings, usage and types. Toponym is the general term for a proper name of any geographical feature, and full scope of the term also includes proper names of all cosmographical features.
Kleve is a town in the Lower Rhine region of northwestern Germany near the Dutch border and the River Rhine. From the 11th century onwards, Cleves was capital of a county and later a duchy. Today, Cleves is the capital of the district of Kleve in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The city is home to one of the campuses of the Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences.
A demonym or gentilic is a word that identifies a group of people in relation to a particular place. Demonyms are usually derived from the name of the place. Demonyms are used to designate all people of a particular place, regardless of ethnic, linguistic, religious or other cultural differences that may exist within the population of that place. Examples of demonyms include Cochabambino, for someone from the city of Cochabamba; French for a person from France; and Swahili, for a person of the Swahili coast.
Placenames in the German language area can be classified by the language from which they originate, and by era.
An endonym is a common, native name for a group of people, individual person, geographical place, language or dialect, meaning that it is used inside a particular group or linguistic community to identify or designate themselves, their homeland, or their language.
Many places in Central Europe, mostly in the former German Empire and Austria-Hungary but now in non-German-speaking countries, traditionally had names in the German language. Many such names have been used for centuries by the German presence in the area dating back to Ostsiedlung, while some others were simply German transliterations of local names or names invented in the 19th and 20th centuries.
An ethnonym is a name applied to a given ethnic group. Ethnonyms can be divided into two categories: exonyms and autonyms, or endonyms.
Below is a list of German language exonyms for formerly German places and other places in non-German-speaking areas of the world. Archaic names are in italics.
An English exonym is a name in the English language for a place, or occasionally other terms, which does not follow the local usage. Exonyms and endonyms are features of all languages, and other languages may have their own exonym for English endonyms, for example Llundain is the Welsh exonym for the English endonym "London".
Danish language exonyms for non-Danish speaking locations exist, primarily in Europe, but many of these are no longer commonly used, with a few notable exceptions. Rom (Rome), Lissabon, Sankt Petersborg and Prag (Prague) are still compulsory, while e.g. Venedig is more common than Venezia (Venice). In the decades following World War II, there has been a strong tendency towards replacing Danish exonyms with the native equivalent used in the foreign country itself. Possibly this is because many of these Danish forms were imported from German.
Below is a list of Finnish language exonyms for places in non-Finnish-speaking areas:
The various names used since classical times for the people known today as the Celts are of disparate origins.
The modern Welsh language contains names for many towns and other geographical features in Great Britain and elsewhere. Names for places outside of Welsh-speaking regions are exonyms, not including spelling or pronunciation adaptations and translations of common nouns.
Many places have exonyms, names for places that differs from that used in the official or well-established language within that place, in the Albanian language.