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.
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 place of origin, 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 toponyms in the historical region of Lorraine are often known by very different names depending on the language in which they are expressed. This article provides an understanding of the linguistic and historical origin of this diversity and lists a number of correspondences for communes and lesser localities in the four departments of the former region: Meuse, Meurthe-et-Moselle, Moselle, and Vosges.
This is a list of Lithuanian language exonyms for places outside the Republic of Lithuania.
This is a list of Bulgarian exonyms for places that do not use Bulgarian. This list includes only names that are significantly different from the local toponym, and archaic or obsolete names are italicized.
Below is a list of modern-day Greek language exonyms for mostly European places outside of Greece and Cyprus. Place names that are not mentioned are generally referred to in Greek by their respective names in their native languages, or with the closest pronunciation in Greek.
The Alagwa are a Cushitic ethnic group mostly based in the Kondoa District of the Dodoma Region in central Tanzania, an area well known for rock art. Smaller numbers of Alagwa reside in the Hanang district of the Manyara Region in Tanzania, as well. They speak the Alagwa language as a mother tongue, which belongs to the South Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family. In 2022, the Alagwa population was estimated to number 52,816 individuals, and Mous (2016) estimates the number of speakers to be slightly over 10,000.
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.
Translating a non-Chinese toponym into a Chinese exonym is a complex task, given the high number of homophones in Chinese, the existence of multiple conventions for translation, and differences in the phonetic systems between the source language and Chinese.
Japanese exonyms are the names of places in the Japanese language that differ from the name given in the place's dominant language.
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