Open Access

Uršula Krevs Birk

• The article deals with place names/toponyms in Slovene and German, two languages that were in contact since the 8th century. Local names of geographical features are endonyms and differ from the foreign names (exonyms) for the same feature. Since both languages existed at the same territory because of the political reasons, the Slovene ethnic territory was under a strong influence of German language. Because of that German has a lot of german exonyms for Slovene geographical features and the Slovene language has a lot exonyms for geographical features on german territory. For the bilingual region of Austria where a small Slovene minority lives the bilingual endonyms are typical. The pairs of German and Slovene bilingual toponyms were generated also for international regions. The author discusses the types of bilingual geographical names. The knowledge of such bilingual place names is relevant for many issues such as translation and intercultural linguistics.