Official and unofficial in urban toponymy

The paper presents some characteristics of the official and unofficial Zagreb urbanonymy from a cultural-geographical perspective. Streets, squares, parks, riverbanks, districts, as well as administrative, military, health, educational, scientific, cultural, sports and social facilities have official names. Some also have nicknames. The names of streets, squares, and parks can reflect the dialectal forms of the Kajkavian dialect. Residential and office buildings generally do not have official names. Most of the research deals with the naming motivations of such buildings. The main sources are online sources, including language corpora gathered and managed in the Sketch Engine application, websites, online dictionaries, Croatian Wikipedia, etc. The results indicate that the name of a residential or office building most often originates from some visual characteristics of the building, from a metaphor for such a characteristic, its location, the name of a person associated with the construction of the building, or the name of the company that has its offices there. A recent trend of giving office buildings English names to attract tenants has also been noticed.

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Publication Details

Journal
Acta onomastica
Published
2025-01-01
DOI
https://doi.org/10.58756/a2665532
Primary Topic
Literature, Language, and Rhetoric Studies
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

Official and unofficial in urban toponymy

Ivana Crljenko
1 links
Acta onomastica
Literature, Language, and Rhetoric Studies
article

Official and unofficial in urban toponymy

Ivana Crljenko
article en

Abstract

The paper presents some characteristics of the official and unofficial Zagreb urbanonymy from a cultural-geographical perspective. Streets, squares, parks, riverbanks, districts, as well as administrative, military, health, educational, scientific, cultural, sports and social facilities have official names. Some also have nicknames. The names of streets, squares, and parks can reflect the dialectal forms of the Kajkavian dialect. Residential and office buildings generally do not have official names. Most of the research deals with the naming motivations of such buildings. The main sources are online sources, including language corpora gathered and managed in the Sketch Engine application, websites, online dictionaries, Croatian Wikipedia, etc. The results indicate that the name of a residential or office building most often originates from some visual characteristics of the building, from a metaphor for such a characteristic, its location, the name of a person associated with the construction of the building, or the name of the company that has its offices there. A recent trend of giving office buildings English names to attract tenants has also been noticed.

Acta onomasticaVol. 66(1)
Openalex Percentile: Top 85%
Literature, Language, and Rhetoric Studies
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Official and unofficial in urban toponymy — Ivana Crljenko · Acta onomastica (2025) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS