Official toponym

An official toponym is determined by law, by an administrative body (of the municipality, the subnational unit, the state) or by an official authority (e.g., surveying office). It is often selected from several existing toponyms.

An official toponym is determined by law, by an administrative body (of the municipality, the subnational unit, the state) or by an official authority (e.g., surveying office). It is often selected from several existing toponyms. However, depending on the legal status of the determining institution, there are several degrees of officialness of a toponym and depending on the feature category of the geographical object designated by the toponym, there are different ways of determining the official toponym. Names of populated places of all sizes (from a farmstead to a large city), of traffic areas in populated places and of administrative entities at all levels (from the municipality to the state) are usually determined or approved by law or ordinance or by the responsible administrative body. In many states, for example, the owner of a house or homestead has the right to propose the name of the property, but this must be approved by the responsible administrative body (usually the local council or the mayor) in order to be considered official. From the locality upwards, it is usually the administrative bodies themselves that determine the name. The relevant administrative body also usually decides on the names of traffic areas in populated places. Toponyms determined in this way enjoy the highest degree of officiality. In the case of toponyms of all other feature categories (relief forms, landscapes, fields, bodies of water, traffic routes outside of populated places, etc.), the responsibility for name finding and determining is usually outsourced from the administrative authorities to special institutions such as map and surveying offices, hydrographic services, etc. They survey local usage, often seek advice from experts and expert committees when determining the chosen name, and publish it on maps and in databases. Such names are not determined by administrative bodies, but only by institutions commissioned with the name standardization and therefore have a lower degree of officiality. However, the procedure described here only corresponds to what is probably the most common case worldwide. The names of other feature categories (e.g. bodies of water and relief) can also be determined by administrative bodies, and there are states that have set up a state naming authority that either determines all types of toponyms themselves or has to approve them so that they gain official validity. In contrast to decentralized and federal political systems, centralized and unitarian states tend to do this. In democratic political systems, the official toponym usually corresponds to an endonym in the sense of the name actually accepted and used by the local community, because it is determined bottom-up. In authoritarian political systems, however, official toponyms can also be imposed from outside and not or only reluctantly used by the local community. They must then count as exonyms. Several names of a geographical feature can also be determined official toponyms. They can additionally be the names used for the feature by linguistic minorities residing there. The United Nations strongly recommends determining minority names as official toponyms of equal rank. Official toponyms appear in public space on official town signs, street signs, traffic information signs and as inscriptions on public buildings. They are also reflected by official topographical maps, gazetteers and in school atlases. Tourist and hiking maps, on the other hand, often also contain non-official toponyms. Databases and geographic information systems (GIS) make it possible to store and identify not only official toponyms, but all variants of names. Maps on the Internet (e.g., GoogleEarth), whose data are often crowd-sourced, are not a reliable source for official toponyms. The names of an official language valid in a state or in a part of a state are not eo ipso official toponyms. Rather, it requires its own determination by a law, an administrative body or an authority. Official toponyms have a fixed and invariable spelling, which can also deviate from the applicable orthography. Name suffixes such as Frankfurt am Main, Halle (Saale) or Klagenfurt am Wörthersee are integral parts of the official name and may at most be abbreviated (Frankfurt a. M., Klagenfurt a. W.). Even if there is more than one official name, in principle all official names of an object should always be mentioned, preferably separated by a slash, because this best expresses the equal status of all names (e.g. Bautzen/Budyšin). In maps, however, a lack of space can force you to do without it.