Hungarian National Toponym Registry Program

Abstract

The prehistory of Hungarian onomastics goes back to the beginning of the 19th century, and over the past two centuries there have been several projects aimed at collecting the Hungarian toponym corpus. The Hungarian National Toponym Registry Program, established with the support of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, has set itself the goal of collecting the Hungarian toponymicon of the Carpathian Basin in a comprehensive manner, presenting the names to both the professional community and the wider public after adequate documentation and the analysis of the individual names. The work exploring toponyms is carried out as part of a broad academic collaboration, primarily relying on universities of the region as its basis, where the staff of the program is trained and prepared specifically for this task. Online learning materials also facilitate the coherent implementation of the work. The program covers all Hungarian-speaking settlements of the region, but also the toponym use in minority languages in Hungary. In addition to the contemporary toponym corpus, it also takes into account toponym records from historical sources going back to the beginning of Hungarian written culture. Given the diversity of the scholarly uses of place names, the program is necessarily multi- and interdisciplinary in nature, ensured by the professional composition of the staff. The program planned to span a decade will publish toponyms in the form of online databases and printed books, thus updating and significantly expanding the overall corpus of the disciplines that use place names as a resource.