The relationship between landscape and place names is very strong. In ancient times, places were named after natural resources and the landscape’s hydro-geo-morphological features. This trend persists today in some contexts. For instance, Abui place names on Alor Island are named after important landscape features, agricultural and horticultural crops, and useful plants. Abui toponyms are compounded with lexemes describing human settlements and highlighting the close relationship between nature and man. This chapters shows how the analysis of the landscape and related disciplines, like landscape archaeology (the study of the past use of the landscape determined by archaeological findings), enable scholars to reconstruct the remote origins of toponyms both in Indo-European and non-Indo-European contexts. While landscape is often considered in association with the physical features of a territory, the authors call for a holistic view of the landscape itself, which blends physical, social, cultural, environmental, and religious dimensions. To this end, toponyms are useful tools providing the researchers with insights into how people use or used the landscape.

In this chapter, the authors explore the sociopolitical and cultural issues surrounding the uses of place names in society. Place names are social constructs that show people’s attachment to the land they live in; they help communities to navigate and orientate, pass down oral traditions, and demonstrate the changes to the landscape. Such functions of place names are more keenly felt by Indigenous communities, who share a close connection with place names, their lands, and cultural heritage. Given that toponyms have symbolic, cultural, and historical significance, they are unsurprisingly used by groups to assert control – be it a more powerful linguistic group subduing minority groups and their languages, or, in settler colonies, the colonial powers using place names to show power differentials between the coloniser and the colonised. However, natives also exercise agency, as they seek to rename and decolonise colonial names, although they are not always successful. This chapter relates to the cultural politics of naming, i.e., how people seek to control, negotiate, and contest the naming process as they engage in wider struggles for legitimacy and visibility. The chapter also deals with a gamma of different toponymic changes and with the notion of ‘toponymic nickname’, providing a comprehensive list of examples from around the world.

Historical toponomastics is the discipline that deals with the reconstruction of the roots of toponyms in the context of well-known languages/language families (e.g., Indo-European) and in the presence of available historical records. The analysis of the etymology and morphology of a place name occurs not just at the linguistic level, but also incorporates the assessment of the territory’s geology and hydro-geo-morphology. This chapter presents a step-by-step guide in historical toponomastics that involves both linguistic and extra-linguistic analyses. The authors apply this to two toponyms from the Indo-European language family, Sessame and Squaneto, both located in Piedmont, northwest Italy. This chapter also discusses the notion of ‘folk etymology’ and ‘toponymic paretymology’, often observed in the stories told by local speakers trying to explain the origins and meanings of their toponyms. These ‘explanations’ may not always be accurate. These, indeed, originate from the linguistic misinterpretations of place names, when the original morphology and/or meaning of toponyms are lost over time. This chapter explores two types of toponymic paretymologies – ‘bona fide paretymology’ and ‘scholarly paretymology’, with examples from both Indo-European and non-Indo-European contexts. The chapter also presents an in-depth discussion of contact etymology.

This chapter explores the notion of diachronic toponymy, which is the discipline that deals with the reconstruction of a place name in the context of undocumented languages/language families and in the absence of historical records. In many communities that do not have a writing system, oral stories and traditions become important sources of toponymic data, as place names are passed down orally, from one generation to another. Additionally, oral stories also commemorate the land and its namers, and are an ‘oral record’ of the physical territory and the changes made to it by human inhabitation. The chapter presents a step-by-step guide for studying place names according to a diachronic toponymy approach – one that also incorporates methods from anthropological linguistics, language documentation, and field linguistics. This is applied to a toponymic system in the Abui community on Alor Island, southeast Indonesia. The authors also demonstrate how historical semantics can complement the toponymic analysis by applying its criteria to a toponymic system which includes several Abui toponyms that show a semantic specialisation of the Abui term for ‘village’.

The aim of a toponymist is to reconstruct and analyse the most original or ancient possible root of a toponym. This requires the linguist to go back to prehistoric times. Yet, at a certain point, scholars will run out of historical sources that can be analysed. They can then postulate the existence of pre-languages that predate proto-languages (since toponymic roots belong to proto-languages). Both types of prehistoric languages are unattested, but a proto-language can be reconstructed by using historical-linguistic methods, while a pre-language cannot. This chapter focusses on the most well-researched language family in the world, Indo-European, and surveys a number of theories on the origins of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European and their relations to Pre-Indo-European civilisations. Toponyms are often ‘linguistic relics’ and, at times, can provide useful insights into pre- and proto-languages spoken in prehistoric times and the dynamics between ancient groups of speakers. This is discussed through the analyses of two case studies, and shows that a root may be reused and refunctionalised in a new proto-language and acquire new meanings and uses.

This chapter introduces the readers to the relationship between toponymy and cartography. Although given for granted, place names are an essential component of a map. Toponyms serve important cartographic/topographic functions, such as helping users to search for and to locate places on a map. They also have an affective role; the act of seeing place names on a map evokes an emotional input that (re)connects a person with a place. Both toponyms and maps have the ideological function of possession and control of territories. This is especially true in colonial contexts. The chapter makes a note that maps are not a modern invention; they have been produced since ancient times and, hence, are useful in studying the denominations of old place names and the geopolitical realities of the past. In the final part of this chapter, the authors turn their attention to phantom place names, i.e., places that have been believed to be real and, although charted on maps, turned out to be non-existent. They are part of a broader set of legendary and literary place names that evoke what is called the ‘feeling of place’ and reveal much of the human nature (e.g., the love for exploration and the desire for beauty/earthly pleasures).

Languages are constantly changing. The reasons for the changes can be both internal (i.e., when monolingual speakers adopt new ways of saying things according to social factors like age, gender, and class) and external (e.g., language contact). Although toponyms are ‘linguistic fossils’ that tend to retain older linguistic features and can withstand violent population shifts more so than the general lexicon, they are also affected by the process of language change. This is explored through several examples from around the world. It is only through analysing language change – with an approach that incorporates historical-linguistic methodologies like the comparative method and dialectological interpretations – that a toponymist can reconstruct the original (and most remote) toponymic root of a place name. The latter half of the chapter demonstrates how toponyms can be used to ‘crack’ hitherto undeciphered languages, the most notable being Linear B (a syllabic writing system transcribing Mycenaean Greek, an archaic form of Ancient Greek). The authors also apply an experimental methodology, using toponyms, to provide a possible interpretation of place names possibly transcribed through Linear A (the grammatological ancestor of the Linear B writing system).