The Joint ICA/IGU Commission on Toponymy invites you to attend the GeoNames19 Symposium Place names and migration in Vienna, Austria from 6–8 November 2019.
Migration is a global and all-time phenomenon. Ever since humankind exists, people were migrating – individually or in groups. Concerning place names people can migrate to rather scarcely named areas but also to areas that have a densely and established namescape. Especially in the latter case it is interesting to look on how people – often with a different linguistic and cultural background – deal with the situation. Recent research shows that place names are clearly connected to personal and group identity. But research on how exactly migrants use, adapt and maybe change place names is a desideratum.
Related to place names, this prompts a number of delicate questions: How do migrants deal with place names? Do they accept the place names they find? Do they adapt them to their own language by translation, morphological or phonetic adaptation? Do they create new names of their own for already named places? And how do long-term residents of the place react to these attitudes?
Some of these questions get addressed already in traditional fields of onomastics. Additionally recent fields of study like “critical onomastics” and “colonial onomastics” give a new view on the same questions. The symposium intends to highlight in this respect various historical situations as well as recent migration events in all parts of the world.
Subthemes (with no claim to be exhaustive):
- Place-name use in historical situations of migration
- Place-name use in recent situations of migration
- Reactions of long-term residents to the place-name use by migrants
- Attempts (by migrants or the resident community) of integrating migrant place names into the official namescape
- Place-name use of migrants by feature categories
- Place-name use by kinds of migration
- Transfer of place names from the former home to the new place
- Use of exonyms of the local community by migrants
No participation fee is requested.
Symposion language: English
Venue: Bundesamt für Eich- und Vermessungswesen (Federal Office of Metrology and Surveying), Schiffamtsgasse 1-3, 1020 Vienna
For more details and registration visit ortsnamen.at/ako50
