Hispanic Toponymy of North, Central and South America in Ecolinguistic Terms

The article represents an attempt to study Hispanic toponominations of the USA, Canada and Latin America through the prism of ecolinguistics. 1 Hispanic place names are of significant interest in various aspects of linguistic knowledge but have not been previously considered in the linguo-ecological context. The author provides the analysis of Hispanic layer units of North and South America through certain classification. It includes the interpretation of two areas of research: natural and social. Each category is then subdivided into semantic subcategories that further define specific types of human interaction with the environment. As research methods, the author uses both the traditional method of continuous sampling of toponymic units from her personal database and modern information technologies: online toponymic dictionaries, the GeoNames electronic database, scientometric resources. The article concludes that descriptive toponyms and hagiotoponyms are the most numerous among the categories of the aspect considered and that Hispanic toponyms in general act as markers of national identity in the regions in question. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .