e-Onomastics
- blog on e-Onomastics - digital onomastics - e-Science about proper names - blogue sur e-Onomastique - onomastique numérique - e-Science sur les noms propres - Blog über e-Onomastik - digitale Onomastik - e-Wissenschaft über die Namenkunde - блог по oномастике
Thursday, February 5, 2026
Festschrift in Honour of the Renowned Toponymist Elena Berezovich on Her 60th Birthday
Monday, February 2, 2026
German Researchers Win Prestigious American Name Society Best Article Award 2025
The award went to Professor Søren Wichmann and Lennart Chevallier for their groundbreaking article “Mapping Place Names”, published in Names: A Journal of Onomastics (Vol. 73 No. 2, 2025). The American Name Society (ANS), one of the world’s oldest scholarly societies dedicated to the scientific study of names and naming practices, bestows this annual prize on the article its editorial board believes has made the most significant contribution to onomastic research.
Innovating Toponymic Research with Data and Software
In their award-winning paper, Wichmann and Chevallier demonstrate how large-scale toponymic data can be analyzed using modern computational tools. Drawing on the global GeoNames database, the researchers developed the “toponym” package for the statistical programming environment R.
Their article contrasts two approaches to studying place names. The traditional philological approach focuses on individual names and their etymologies, while a more modern pattern-seeking approach examines multiple names together to uncover broader geographical and linguistic trends. Through this framework and the use of large datasets, they argue, scholars can gain new insights into the spatial patterns and historical processes that shape naming systems worldwide.
To illustrate the power of this methodology, the authors include two case studies: one on the place names of the Xincan language area in Guatemala and another on Slavic toponyms in eastern Germany. These examples show how computational analysis can complement traditional name research and open new avenues of inquiry for onomasts everywhere.
A Milestone for Onomastic Scholarship
The Best Article Award has been a tradition of the American Name Society since the early 2000s and recognizes outstanding scholarship that pushes the boundaries of name studies. Articles are assessed on criteria such as originality, methodological rigor, clarity of presentation, and potential impact on the field.
For the University of Kiel’s ROOTS research cluster and its partners, the award is a notable recognition of the growing importance of interdisciplinary methods in onomastics - especially those that integrate digital humanities, geospatial data, and computational linguistics.
Looking Forward
This accolade highlights a promising trend in onomastic research: the use of big data and software tools to analyze naming patterns across large geographic areas. As global name datasets - from online gazetteers to historical registers - become increasingly accessible, computational approaches promise to enrich our understanding of how names emerge, spread, and shift over time.
Congratulations to Søren Wichmann and Lennart Chevallier for their contribution to advancing the scientific study of names and for receiving one of onomastics’ highest honors.
Friday, January 30, 2026
India Digitizes Its Linguistic Geography: AI Meets Traditional Place-Name Surveying
A groundbreaking partnership between Digital India's BHASHINI Division and the Survey of India promises to preserve India's multilingual toponymic heritage while modernizing geospatial infrastructure
On January 20, 2026, India took a significant step toward reconciling its extraordinary linguistic diversity with the demands of digital governance. The Digital India BHASHINI Division, under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Survey of India to digitize, transcribe, and standardize over 1.6 million geographical place names using AI-powered speech and language technologies.
This isn't just administrative housekeeping - it's cultural preservation meeting technological innovation at massive scale.
The Challenge: 16 Lakh Locations, Dozens of Languages
India's toponymic landscape is staggeringly complex. The Survey of India, as the national nodal agency for geographical name standardization, conducts extensive field surveys collecting place names in local vernacular languages across 22 constitutionally recognized languages plus hundreds of dialects. These audio recordings capture how communities actually pronounce their villages, rivers, mountains, and neighborhoods - knowledge that risks being lost or distorted when transcribed by outsiders unfamiliar with local phonology.
The traditional workflow - manual transcription of audio recordings into various scripts (Devanagari, Roman, regional scripts like Tamil or Bengali) - is labor-intensive, error-prone, and struggles to maintain consistency across India's vast geographic and linguistic diversity. With over 1.6 million locations requiring documentation, the backlog is immense.
The Solution: BHASHINI's Language AI
BHASHINI (which stands for "BHASHa INterface for India") brings sophisticated speech-to-text and natural language processing capabilities specifically trained on Indian languages. The collaboration will deploy:
Automated Speech Recognition (ASR): Converting massive volumes of field-recorded audio into structured digital text across multiple Indian languages and dialects
Language Normalization: Standardizing spelling variations while preserving linguistic authenticity - crucial when a single place name might be pronounced differently across communities
Multi-script Processing: Generating toponyms in local scripts, Devanagari, Roman transliteration, and other formats simultaneously, ensuring accessibility across different administrative and technological systems
Validation Workflows: AI-assisted quality control maintaining accuracy while dramatically accelerating processing speed
This technological pipeline will feed into the National Geographical Name Information System (NGNIS), creating a comprehensive, validated Toponymy Database aligned with the National Geospatial Policy, 2022.
Why This Matters: Beyond Maps
The implications extend far beyond cartography:
Preserving Linguistic Heritage: Audio documentation captures correct pronunciation and regional variations that written forms alone cannot preserve. When a Kerala village's Malayalam name gets Romanized carelessly, meaning and cultural identity erode. This initiative prioritizes preservation of authentic local linguistic forms.
Governance and Service Delivery: Accurate, standardized place names are foundational for disaster management, infrastructure planning, census operations, and citizen services. Inconsistent toponyms create confusion in emergency response, development planning, and administrative coordination.
Multilingual Digital Infrastructure: The collaboration embeds language AI across national digital public infrastructure where linguistic accuracy is critical. Government portals, mapping applications, and administrative systems must handle India's linguistic diversity without forcing citizens into a single linguistic framework.
Standards Alignment: By coordinating with the Survey of India Toponymy Manual and Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) codes, the initiative ensures that digitization doesn't create new inconsistencies but rather strengthens existing standardization frameworks.
The Indigenous AI Vision
Significantly, this MoU reflects the Government of India's broader vision of building "indigenous, AI-enabled digital infrastructure rooted in Indian linguistic realities." Rather than adapting Western language technologies designed for English, French, or Mandarin, BHASHINI develops AI trained on the specific phonological, morphological, and orthographic characteristics of Indian languages.
This matters because Indian languages present unique challenges: complex consonant clusters in Sanskrit-derived names, retroflex consonants absent in European languages, nasalization patterns, tone systems in certain tribal languages, and orthographic variation even within single languages (multiple valid spellings of the same toponym).
Generic AI trained primarily on English performs poorly on these features. Indigenous language AI - trained on actual Indian speech patterns, aware of regional pronunciation variations, capable of handling multiple scripts - is essential for this task.
Scale and Scope
The numbers are impressive:
- 1.6+ million locations to be documented
- Multiple scripts: Local regional scripts, Devanagari, Roman, and others
- Dozens of languages: Covering India's official languages plus numerous dialects
- Audio preservation: Maintaining pronunciation records alongside textual transcriptions
- Integration: Feeding Open Series Maps, governance platforms, and public information systems
This isn't a pilot project - it's nationwide infrastructure development operating at the scale India's population and diversity demand.
The Broader Context: Onomastics Meets Policy
From an onomastic perspective, this initiative addresses crucial questions about how postcolonial nations manage toponymic heritage in the digital age:
Standardization vs. Authenticity: How do you create consistent national datasets while respecting local linguistic variation? BHASHINI's approach - maintaining audio records alongside standardized written forms - attempts to balance both imperatives.
Script Politics: India's linguistic federalism means different states use different scripts. Generating toponyms simultaneously in multiple scripts acknowledges this reality rather than imposing hierarchical standardization.
Pronunciation Authority: By prioritizing field recordings from local communities, the initiative centers indigenous knowledge over colonial-era transliterations or outsider transcriptions. This is toponymic decolonization through technology.
Digital Divide: Ensuring place-name data works across "maps, digital platforms and governance systems" recognizes that toponymic accuracy matters for equitable access to government services, especially for rural and tribal communities whose place names have historically been most distorted in official records.
What Could Go Wrong
Potential challenges include:
- Dialect Recognition: Can AI accurately distinguish between closely related dialects where pronunciation differences matter?
- Script Standardization: When multiple valid spellings exist, whose version becomes official?
- Quality Control: How do you validate AI transcriptions at scale without recreating the manual bottleneck?
- Minority Languages: Will smaller linguistic communities receive equal technological investment?
The partnership's success depends on how sensitively these tensions are navigated.
A Model for Multilingual Nations
If executed well, India's approach could become a model for other linguistically diverse nations grappling with similar challenges - Indonesia, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, and many others face comparable toponymic complexities.
The innovation isn't just technological but conceptual: recognizing that accurate geographical data requires linguistic sophistication, that standardization needn't mean erasure of diversity, and that digital infrastructure must embed rather than override local knowledge systems.
As one official statement notes, the collaboration "reflects BHASHINI's approach of embedding language AI across national digital public infrastructure systems where linguistic accuracy is critical for service delivery and decision-making."
In other words: you can't govern a multilingual nation effectively if your maps, databases, and administrative systems can't handle linguistic diversity. This MoU acknowledges that reality and deploys AI to address it at scale.
The Partnership:
Digital India BHASHINI Division (Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology)
Survey of India
MoU signed: January 20, 2026
The Goal:
Digitize, transcribe, and standardize 1.6+ million geographical place names across India using AI-powered speech and language technologies
The Impact:
Preserving linguistic heritage while modernizing geospatial infrastructure for governance, disaster management, infrastructure planning, and citizen services
For toponymists, this represents one of the largest-scale applications of language AI to place-name standardization globally. For India, it's essential infrastructure for equitable digital governance in a radically multilingual democracy.
24th Slovak Onomastic Conference "Continuity, Variability and Innovation in Onomastics"
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| Not an official poster. AI-generated image for illustrative purposes Continuity, Variability, and Innovation in Onomastics 17–19 August 2026 | Stará Lesná, High Tatras (Slovakia) The Slovak Linguistic Society at the Ľudovít Štúr Institute of Linguistics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAS), together with the Slovak Onomastic Commission, warmly invite scholars and students to take part in the 24th Slovak Onomastic Conference, to be held from 17 to 19 August 2026 in the breathtaking setting of the High Tatras, at the SAS ACADEMIA Congress Centre in Stará Lesná. About the ConferenceIn Slovakia, onomastics is regarded as an independent linguistic discipline that actively collaborates with other branches of linguistics and with a wide range of related scholarly fields. Although a universally accepted general theory of proper names has not yet emerged - and debates continue concerning proprial meaning and the relationship between appellatives and proper names - the Slovak onomastic tradition builds firmly on the theoretical and methodological foundations laid by Professor Vincent Blanár. At the core of this tradition lies the understanding of the proper name as a linguistic sign sui generis, characterized by specifically onymic features, and by the close interconnection between the linguistic and onymic status of the proper name and its functioning in communication. This semiotic and functional-structural approach to proper names and onomastics has inspired not only Slovak scholars, but many researchers internationally. The aim of the conference is to deepen and further develop Blanár’s theoretical legacy, especially in areas that have so far received less attention, and to address those domains where Slovak onomastics still sees room - and responsibility - for further advancement. This includes the use of innovative and variant methodological approaches in both comprehensive and partial analyses of different types of names. At the same time, the organizers emphasize that the goal of onomastic research is not mere description. Empirical findings must be synthesized and interpreted in ways that genuinely advance theoretical knowledge in the field. The conference therefore seeks to critically examine whether new theoretical concepts, methods, and approaches are truly productive and innovative - or whether they sometimes represent only superficial borrowing from “neo-onomastic” disciplines, the revival of ideas long surpassed in onomastic theory, or the rebranding of well-established practices (such as the use of corpus data) as methodological breakthroughs. Scientific Committee & Organizing TeamThe conference is organized by an international team of leading onomasticians and linguists, including:
Registration
Conference Fees
Papers & Publication
Conference Languages
Practical InformationDetails on accommodation, meals, and transport will be sent by 15 June 2026. Contact person: PhDr. Iveta Valentová, PhD. 📧 iveta.valentova@juls.savba.sk Accommodation & MealsParticipants cover their own accommodation, meals, and travel costs. The SAS ACADEMIA Congress Centre offers discounted accommodation for conference participants (and accompanying family members) from 15–20 August 2026, with the possibility of extending the stay. Due to limited capacity, early booking is strongly recommended. Breakfast is included in the accommodation price. Lunches and dinners are ordered and paid individually at the congress centre. The gala dinner and coffee breaks are included in the conference fee. 📌 Why attend? Stručne po slovensky Slovenská jazykovedná spoločnosť pri Jazykovednom ústave Ľ. Štúra SAV a Slovenská onomastická komisia pozývajú na 24. slovenskú onomastickú konferenciu s názvom Kontinuita, variabilita a inovácie v onomastike, ktorá sa uskutoční 17. – 19. augusta 2026 v Starej Lesnej vo Vysokých Tatrách (Kongresové centrum SAV ACADEMIA). Konferencia nadväzuje na teoretické a metodologické východiská slovenskej onomastickej školy (V. Blanár) a kladie dôraz na kritickú reflexiu nových prístupov, metód a konceptov v onomastike. Cieľom je nielen opis onymického materiálu, ale aj jeho syntéza a posun teoretického poznania.
Prihlášky (aktívna aj pasívna účasť) je potrebné podať do 15. 4. 2026. Konferenčné jazyky sú slovanské jazyky, angličtina a nemčina. Konferencia ponúka odborný program, zborník príspevkov a stretnutie medzinárodnej onomastickej komunity v jedinečnom horskom prostredí. |
Thursday, January 29, 2026
Online-Vortrag "Dorf und Umland. Orts- und Flurnamen"
Viele dieser Namen sind wandelbar und reichen doch bis ins Mittelalter zurück.
In unserem Online-Vortrag im Rahmen der Digitalen Mitteldeutschen Vortragsreihe gehen wir den sprachlichen Spuren der Reformation in der mitteldeutschen Namenlandschaft nach. Flur- und Ortsnamen geben Hinweise auf historische Ereignisse und zeigen, wie Menschen mit ihnen umgingen. Ein besonderer Fokus liegt auf dem Thüringischen Flurnamenportal.
🎤 Es referieren:
• Dr. Christian Zschieschang (Sorbisches Institut e.V.)
• PD Dr. Barbara Aehnlich (Universität Jena)
• David Brosius (Universität Jena)
🗓 02.02.2026
⏰ 18:00 Uhr
💻 Online
🔗 Meldet euch jetzt an: hier
#Flurnamen #Ortsnamen #Reformation #Mitteldeutschland #Thüringen #Sprachgeschichte
#GeschichteEntdecken #OnlineVortrag #Wissenschaft #Kulturgeschichte
Wednesday, January 28, 2026
A Cross-Cultural Guide to Biblical Names in China and Australia
With a curated collection of a couple thousand names, we have explored the linguistic and cultural nuances of both regions. We have highlighted the top-trending names currently favored in Australia and China, helping you identify choices that are modern and accessible, as well as those that remain classic and traditional.
Product information from here
ASIN : B0GJYJY2XB
Editor : Independently published
When: 26. Januar 2026
Language : Englisch
Pages : 374 pp.
ISBN-13 : 979-8245706351



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