An endonym or autonym is a common, self-chosen, name of a group of people, an individual person of that group, a geographical place, a language or a dialect; it is 'native' in the sense that it is used inside or by a particular group or linguistic community to identify or designate themselves, their place of origin, or their language.
An exonym or xenonym is a foreign-established, name for a group of people, an individual person of that group, a geographical place, a language, or a dialect, meaning that it is used primarily outside the particular place inhabited by the group or linguistic community. Exonyms exist not only for historico-geographical reasons but also in consideration of difficulties when pronouncing foreign words, or from non-systematic or failed attempts to properly and faithfully transcribe and translate local-originated names into different writing systems.
For instance, is the endonym for the country that is also known by the exonyms Germany and (in English and Italian, respectively), and (in Spanish and French, respectively), (in Polish), and and (in Finnish and Estonian, respectively).
Naming and etymology The terms autonym, endonym, exonym and xenonym are formed by adding specific prefixes to the Greek root word () , from Proto-Indo-European .
The prefixes added to these terms are also derived from Greek: endonym: () ; exonym: () ; autonym: () ; and xenonym: () .
The terms autonym and xenonym also have different applications, thus leaving endonym and exonym as the preferred forms.
Marcel Aurousseau, an Australian geographer, first (TOC) used the term exonym in his work The Rendering of Geographical Names (1957).
Typology Endonyms and exonyms can be divided into three main categories:
endonyms and exonyms of places (toponyms), endonyms and exonyms of humans (anthroponyms), including names of ethnic groups (ethnonyms), localised populations (demonyms), and individuals (personal names), endonyms and exonyms of languages (glossonyms).Edelman, Loulou. 2009. "What's in a Name? Classification of proper names by language". Pp. 141–53 in Linguistic landscape: expanding the scenery, edited by E. Shohamy and D. Gorter. London: Routledge. Goh, CL.:
"The names of monarchs, popes, and non-contemporary authors as well as place names are commonly translated. Foreign names for geographic proper names are called exonyms. Fourment-Berni Canani (1994) discusses the (im)possibility of translating proper names. He gives examples of the place names Venice and London. The Italian city has been renamed Venice in English and in French. A city in the American state California is also called Venice, but this name is not changed into in Italian and in French. Similarly, the English city London has been renamed in French and in Italian. However, the Canadian city called London is not translated into French and Italian in this way. Thus, as Fourment-Berni Canani concludes, a place name can be translated if the place, as a unique referent, has already been renamed in the target language."
Endonyms and exonyms of toponyms As it pertains to geographical features, the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names defines:.
Endonym: "Name of a geographical feature in an official or well-established language occurring in that area where the feature is located." Exonym: "Name used in a specific language for a geographical feature situated outside the area where that language is spoken, and differing in its form from the name used in an official or well-established language of that area where the geographical feature is located."
For example, India, China, Egypt, and Germany are the English-language exonyms corresponding to the endonyms (), (), (), and , respectively. There are also typonyms of specific features, for example hydronyms for bodies of water.
Endonyms and exonyms of glossonyms In the case of endonyms and exonyms of language names (glossonyms), Chinese, German, and Dutch, for example, are English-language exonyms for the languages that are endonymously known as (), , and Nederlands, respectively.
Exonyms in relation to endonyms
By their relation to endonyms, all exonyms can be divided into three main categories:
those that are cognate words, diverged only in pronunciation or orthography; those that are fully or partially translated (a calque) from the native language; those derived from different roots, as in the case of Germany for .
Sometimes, a place name may be unable to use many of the letters when transliterated into an exonym because of the corresponding language's lack of common sounds. Māori, having only one liquid consonant, is an example of this.
Cognate exonyms London (originally ), for example, is known by the cognate exonyms:
in Basque, Catalan, Filipino, French, Galician, Portuguese, and Spanish; () in Greek; in Dutch and Afrikaans; in Italian, Maltese, Romanian, Romansh, Sardinian and Turkish; in Albanian; in Czech and Slovak; in Polish; in Māori; in Icelandic; in Irish; in Scottish Gaelic; in Welsh; in Finnish; in Vietnamese; () in Persian, Arabic, and Urdu; in Chinese.
Translated exonyms An example of a translated exonym is the name for the Netherlands ( in Dutch) used, respectively, in German (), French (), Italian (), Spanish (), Irish (), Portuguese (), Romanian () and Czech (), all of which mean "Low Countries". However, the endonym is singular, while all the aforementioned translations except Irish and Czech are plural (the french translation being the same in singular and plural).
Native and borrowed exonyms Exonyms can also be divided into native and borrowed, e.g., from a third language. For example, the Slovene exonyms (Vienna) and (Venice) are native, but the Avar name of Paris, (Parizh) is borrowed from Russian (Parizh), which comes from Polish , which comes from Italian .
A substantial proportion of English-language exonyms for places in continental Europe are borrowed (or adapted) from French; for example:
Belgrade (); Bucharest (); Cologne ( / ); Florence (); Milan (); Munich ( / ); Naples ( / ); Navarre ( / ); Prague (); Rome (); and Seville ().
A lot of exonyms for places are borrowed but adapted to the target language's conventions, such as keyboard layout. For example diacritical marks such as two dots above are stripped when English-language media write about them. Transliterations take place if another alphabet is used originally. Pronunciations are also often adapted.
Typical development of exonyms Many exonyms result from adaptations of an endonym into another language, mediated by differences in phonetics, while others may result from translation of the endonym, or as a reflection of the specific relationship an outsider group has with a local place or geographical feature.
According to James Matisoff, who introduced the term autonym into linguistics, exonyms can also arise from the "egocentric" tendency of in-groups to identify themselves with "mankind in general", producing an endonym that out groups would not use, while another source is the human tendency towards neighbours to "be pejorative rather than complimentary, especially where there is a real or fancied difference in cultural level between the ingroup and the outgroup." For example, Matisoff notes, "an opprobrious term indicating mixed race or parentage" is the Palaung name for Jingpo people and the Jingpo name for Chin people; both the Jingpo and Burmese use the Chinese word () as the name for Lisu people.
As exonyms develop for places of significance for speakers of the language of the exonym, consequently, many European capitals have English exonyms, for example:
Athens (); Belgrade (); Bucharest (); Brussels (, ); Copenhagen (); Lisbon (); Moscow (); Prague (); Rome (); Vienna (); and Warsaw ().
In contrast, historically less-prominent capitals such as Ljubljana and Zagreb do not have English exonyms, but do have exonyms in languages spoken nearby, e.g., German: and (the latter being obsolete); Italian: Lubiana and Zagabria. Madrid, Berlin, Oslo, and Amsterdam, with identical names in most major European languages, are exceptions.
Some European cities might be considered partial exceptions, in that whilst the spelling is the same across languages, the pronunciation can differ. For example, the city of Paris is spelled the same way in French and English, but the French pronunciation [] is different from the English pronunciation [].
For places considered to be of lesser significance, attempts to reproduce local names have been made in English since the time of the Crusades. Livorno, for instance, was Leghorn because it was an Italian port essential to English merchants and, by the 18th century, to the British Navy; not far away, Rapallo, a minor port on the same sea, never received an exonym.
In earlier times, the name of the first tribe or village encountered became the exonym for the whole people beyond. Thus, the Romans used the tribal names (Greek) and (Germanic), the Russians used the village name of Chechen, medieval Europeans took the tribal name Tatar as emblematic for the whole Mongolic confederation (and then confused it with Tartarus, a word for Hell, to produce Tartar), and the Magyar invaders were equated with the 500-years-earlier Hunnish invaders in the same territory, and were called Hungarians.
The Germanic invaders of the Roman Empire applied the word "Walha" to foreigners they encountered and this evolved in West Germanic languages as a generic name for speakers of Celtic and later (as Celts became increasingly romanised) Romance languages; thence: Wallachia, the historic name of Romania inhabited by the Vlachs The Slavic term Vlah for "Romanian", dialectally "Italian, Latin"; additionally Vlaška means "Wallachia" in Serbo-Croatian and "Italian woman" in Czech Wallonia, the French-speaking region of Belgium Cornwall and Wales, the Celtic-speaking regions located west of the Anglo-Saxon-dominated England Wallis, a mostly French-speaking canton in Switzerland Welschland, the German name for the French-speaking Switzerland the Polish and Hungarian names for Italy, and respectively
Usage In avoiding exonyms During the late 20th century, the use of exonyms sometimes became controversial. Groups often prefer that outsiders avoid exonyms where they have come to be used in a pejorative way. For example, Romani people often prefer that term (Romani) over exonyms such as Gypsy (from the name of Egypt) or the French term (from the name of Bohemia). People may also avoid exonyms for reasons of historical sensitivity, as in the case of German names for Polish and Czech places that, at one time, had been ethnically or politically German (e.g. Danzig/Gdańsk, Auschwitz/Oświęcim and Karlsbad/Karlovy Vary) or Russian names for non-Russian locations that regained their local name (e.g. Kiev/Kyiv).
In recent years, geographers have sought to reduce the use of exonyms to avoid this kind of problem. For example, it is now common for Spanish speakers to refer to the Turkish capital as Ankara rather than use the Spanish exonym . Another example, it is now common for Italian speakers to refer to some African states as Mauritius and Seychelles rather than use the Italian exonyms Maurizio and Seicelle.Sandro Toniolo, I perché e i nomi della geografia, Istituto Geografico Militare, Florence 2005, p. 88–89, n. 170-171. According to the United Nations Statistics Division:
Time has, however, shown that initial ambitious attempts to rapidly decrease the number of exonyms were over-optimistic and not possible to realise in an intended way. The reason would appear to be that many exonyms have become common words in a language and can be seen as part of the language's cultural heritage.
In preference of exonyms