On Worldbuilding: Place Names — countries, cities, places

Have you ever thought about how we called the planet we live on earth we called it dirt basically soil what we stand on but it got that name because it’s descriptive it is what it is and it’s probably all that humanity could agree on clearly coming up with place

Names be it planets cities continents countries is hard so we’re going to go through how they start how they change and their broader relationship with power and migration and by the end of this we’ll go through a detailed example of the step-by-step process to creating fictional place names and all of this is

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Mental health so keep an eye out place names need to have three dimensions that make them meaningful interesting and realistic world building they tell us something about the place they tell us something about the history or they tell us something about the people the first of these is the one

That most people tend to figure out place names are born when language meets typography overwhelmingly place names refer to natural or man-made landscape features for a natural example in the River Avon Avon means River so yeah it means River River or in the case of man-made landscape features the word

Sister or sister means Castle Gloucester means the castle of Gloucestershire a region in the United Kingdom the moral of the story here is that our ancestors weren’t particularly imaginative when it came to place names but then again half of America calls all fizzy drinks coke so with this being the basis for most

Place names you don’t need to create an entire language but consider creating a lexicon of words in the regional language for those places in your fictional world things like Forest River Hill Valley Farm Castle village and so on this gives you a good basis for suffixes or prefixes or base nouns for

Places in your world for example the word Minister our in Sindarin and Tolkien’s works which is why it’s so often appears in compound names throughout middle-earth Minas Tirith means Tower of the guard and a numinous means western tower talking drew a lot on that base lexicon of words created and naming places throughout

Middle-earth the second of these is that a name tells us something about the history Gregory McNamee wrote about how place names afford a kind of folk history a snapshot in time that enables us to read in them a record of important events for example the name matanza in the florida matanza river means

Slaughter taking its name from a massacre of protestants by the spanish that happened there hence whites and Spanish for a fictional example in George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire the capital city of King’s Landing is named for the place that King Aegon landed and built his first

Fortress it’s a pivotal event in Westerosi history that brought the continent into a new era it’s no wonder that the name stuck and in terms of naming places after historical events these events don’t necessarily need to be true we name a lot of places after legendary or mythical events in Avatar

The Last Airbender the city of Omashu was named for the mythical original earthbenders oh my and shoe who supposedly learned earthbending in the region it doesn’t so much matter whether or not they actually existed or they actually learned earthbending there but it’s part of the perceived folk history

The emphasis that the people who live there put on it but the sid these type of names are typically lists common then topographically determined names like a Gloucester so consider limiting it to the really important historical events in the region the ones that not only the people would think about but people

Outside of the area that they would recognize it’s got to be important enough that this becomes the most recognizable or memorable thing about the area lastly the third thing that a name tells us is something about the people it’s a kind of fossil poetry that allows us to reconstruct something of

The culture of the names at the time they assigned the names to the places they saw what I mean here is that the type of geographical feature that they highlight or the way in which they frame storica Levene’s tells us something about the people who live there or historically lived there Boston was

Originally called try mount by early European colonists named for the three large Peaks that dominated the area the Native American tribes called the place Shawmut meaning a place of water to fury across the European name emphasizes the land where they were first able to build their new settlement in spirit of the

Puritans finding a new home while the Native American name tells us of the ability to travel across the waters and how important that was for their life in this region the emphasis on different geographical elements here tells us something about the people the two different perspectives to see the land

From what they valued what they worked with or used to the land for there’s a goldmine in the Forest of Dean in the UK but the Welsh used this area for a defensive hill fort hence the name Dene rather than how this is often the case for places named after historical events

Using terms like peace victory tragedy or disaster tell us something about what that event meant for their historical identity whether something good or bad came of it and what this place means for them a great fictional example of this is talking city of Oz Gili earth meaning

City of the stars it centered around a great that looks up to the sky an important geographical feature yes but it it goes back to how important the stars were in númenórean culture that their people and those who settled there came from however what place names most commonly

Tell us about the people is very simply who they are England is the land of the angles Scotland is the land of the Scots and Russia is the land of the roofs and there’s nothing wrong with that Auckland and New Zealand yeah land of the orcs on a more local level though

It’s often just whoever lived there first Hildesheim in Germany was named after a major land owned in the area called hildren don’t be afraid to have simple names simple names stick though I do want to caveat this by saying that the size of the region does matter in

What name it ends up with generally speaking the larger the region the broader the name has to be because that’s about what they typically have in common it’s why names often more specific at a local level with villages or counties or even regions because there’s fewer people to recognize what

They’re all about what the most important thing of this region is that place names in your fantasy or science fiction world aren’t just tree land or big battle or wood elf place that’d be boring and blame and pre jarring for the reader know those three big things place

People in history maybe the bedrock on which names are based but a big part about how they sound is how they change over time take our example from before Gloucester has not stayed at the castle of Gloucestershire since the reign of William the Conqueror it has evolved to

A name distinctly its own now there are a whole host of reasons that names and words change over time but we’re gonna focus on the organic processes by which words and names change the first is language evolution the dominant language in the region changes perhaps the word

For lake changes to Loch so people would start calling Lake Michigan like Michigan or it may mean that people had modifies to add clarification when a word becomes unclear in its meaning this is where you get these wonderful tautological names like river avon meaning river river because the angles

Didn’t understand welsh but let’s be honest who does understand Welsh Matt manganui yeah Mountain big mountain moon moon yeah that’s wait no that’s that’s a different thing the second way names changes through simplification this is one of the more important steps as is what removes extra modifying words like of that and on

Turning taupe or new Atia into top or in the North Island but it also removes all combined syllables that are difficult to pronounce or easily skipped over true for place names or otherwise for example talking to old elvish word for dreadful was gira but this evolved over time to

Be gear losing the accent and a number of letters to simplify also I’m using token as an example because he’s really the only one with enough linguistic breadth fear the third way is conflation we discussed before a lexicon of base nouns prefixes and suffixes for places like farm castle river filled hill

Valley and so on where these indicators sounds similar that can bleed into use with one another especially as the original word falls out of use for example froth meaning woodland and Firth meaning watery endless in Old English have sometimes been conflated in historical maps as the language changes and these things he conflated

Lastly elaboration this is when people add modifiers but not because the original word has lost its meaning or it becomes unclear but to distinguish it from a place with a similar or the same name with words like upper and lower or greater and lesser or bigger and smaller

I don’t know is there any example of one place could like bigger thing I don’t even know why for example you may not know but there is a place within London called the City of London which is distinctly a different place people may add additional geographical descriptors

If the land itself has changed some towns in Spain were named after flowers or trees that no longer grow there so when designing a place named based them on one or two of these three foundational categories place history or people but then take them through one or more of these changes evolution

Simplification conflation or elaboration these changes should also reflect the changes in the area topographically demographically and linguistically so that there’s a pairing between the history you’ve created and the names of your world but here’s something that war builders don’t offer consider when naming places in their world power names

Aren’t just about the place history or people but who gets to choose the name of place is about who holds power constantinople was the capital of the Byzantine Empire for nearly a thousand years his name was taken from the Christian Emperor Constantine who made

It the capital in 330 ad and it became a center of power for the West for centuries however in 1453 the Ottoman Empire brought the city to its knees and Mecca made the second officially renamed it Istanbul and it became a center of powerful Islamic culture the fact that

The Arabic name began to be recorded in official maps made by the Ottoman Empire and other Islamic powers at the time and that the Arabic name is used by Islamic countries today tell us not only that the Ottomans held power in the area but who the Allies are and who respects

Their name but the interesting thing is that right through to the 1900s European maps still referred to it as Constantinople the fact that many Westerners still refer to it by its Western name today isn’t just a coincidence it’s a rejection of the power that Turkey is trying to exert and

A repudiation of that ownership of it and the power struggle over Constantinople z’ name goes right down to the post offices they will not deliver mail unless it’s labeled to Istanbul we can see by the maps by the names that people use who was in power

And what that region means to them as opposed to anyone else in the area when it comes to place names how you design a world map which name is in usage who designs it is about their language and what that place means to them when you

Look at a world map you can see some measure of power structures written into it by the names that are used also just for fun here’s a map of all the places that Alexander the Great named after himself in the most common way that we can see these power dynamics arises through the

Use of in denims and Icke sonam’s broadly speaking into names and names bestowed on a place by those who live there while exonym czar names bestowed on a place by those outside of it Scotland for example is an exonym given to the region by the Romans it is the

Land of the Scotty but Scotty was the name the Romans used while they call themselves something closer to the Gaels but the fact that the Romans held power in the region as well as being the ones who kept historical records and detailed maps means that over time it was that

Name that stuck instead of perhaps the gayland that they may have chosen themselves people respected the Roman name so that was the one that took root a fictional example of this is in Tolkien’s into it a great forest to the south of middle-earth in wood is an exonym used by most humans because

That’s where the ends live once again our imagination proves itself but the int themselves have their own in tournaments for the place they live in meaning sunrise forests because they remember when their forest was the easternmost part of a greater forest where the Sun rises but this name is

Never recorded or remembered by anyone else because the powers of the land are the humans record it in their own way and most people refer to it through that exonym so don’t just think about what the name of a place is and what it means to the people who live there think about

What it means to the people who don’t and which name is going to stick and why now what you’re probably noticing here is the inherent relationship with all of us to colonialism indigenous populations will usually have their own exonym for an area for example the maori name for

My own post-colonial country is our tiara but corneal powers just did this thing where they tended to ignore indigenous names we shall name this place what do you mean name this place is called do you have a flag oh what a flag well no but I mean you

Can’t just rename no flag no name this is New England hints new zealand so post-colonial regions tend to have two names for any given place and in denim and a nixon ‘m and which is recorded and remembered tells you a lot about where indigenous populations tended to hold

More power for example in new zealand there are a lot more Maori names in the North Island than the South Island reflective of the fact that 90% of Maori live in the North Island as opposed to just 10% in the south where European names are a lot more common and in the

Context of colonialism names don’t just reflect power but politics and then New Zealand was the predominant title for my country right through to the 1990s but a government initiative to revitalize the maori language over the last two decades has led to our tiara becoming pretty widely used it’s on official documents

Maps and classrooms where it may not have been before by looking at a map and seeing which language or style of names is used where you can almost map out we’re ethno-linguistic groups are who holds power there or who has held historically especially in important geopolitical sites and what that means

To those given in groups in power lastly place names are also about migration we’re building isn’t just about intense detail it’s about how the different factors of your world work in with one another and this goes for the same with your place names in your history see

People groups move about all the time and they take their language culture and ideas with them and this includes how they name things which geographical features they would emphasize their linguistic syntax and their lexicon even if after centuries they left the region or a entirely wiped out or overtaken by

A new group remnants of them being there would remain and seeing where their linguistic traits linger tells us about the history of the area and the history of that people a great example of this is the City of York and the United Kingdom the Danelaw was a region that

The Danes controlled in England Danish words like how for village and thought for Hamlet blended into the anglo-saxon style of names for that region this is a really cool map that shows you how English and Danish names were blended together and where the Danish held the greatest influence and they lived and

Though the Danes were eventually pushed back in certain areas these linguistic traits remained the City of York went from Old English that to Old Norse York to Middle English York combining elements of both of these languages consider mapping out where if no linguistic groups have moved in your world historically and which linguistic

Traits they would leave behind which ones that the people who live there would be likely to pick up even if a new dominant language overtakes afterwards but let’s do it together let’s put all of this work to the test and create a city named step one place history or

People a city that we’re talking about is going to be built around a waterfall that provides fresh water to the people but they also believe that their God is made of water so they call this place the Divine Falls step to change over time the word divine evolves into the

Word divin and the people simplify the language to remove the and the words blend together to become divin Falls step 3 power however soon enough the land is invaded and a new people move into the region these people have trouble pronouncing their DS and they don’t realize what divin Falls

Originally meant so they change it to heaven Falls poem which in their language means heaven Falls or Wharton’s and it’s clarifying what it means to them this name is the one that is recorded on maps and for Santi use as their people dominate the region politically and in terms of population

And there we go it goes from the Divine Falls to heaven Falls palm that to me sounds pretty natural it’s believable I can see that happening about you though because with maps and place names and intense etymology you’ve got to get away to recall them and in that spirit I

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Got features perfectly designed for being a game master a writer a role player or a pure world builder and it’s been really cool to hear from those of you who picked up wood anvil since my last sponsor with them as always links down below at double-damn Volcom to

Check it out and when you’ve got a world anvil page please do shoot me something on Twitter I would love to see how you developed yet Amala G for your place names so in summary with all of us together firstly place names most often tell us something about a central geographical

Feature but they can also refer to important historical events all the people living there themselves however which geographical features historical events and the descriptors given also tell us something about what the people value culturally consider creating a lexicon of base terms like forests in that regional language secondly place

Names change across history as the language evolves speakers simplify the name segments of the name get conflated other terms or people add modifying words to help define the name when it gets confused consider how the words in your lexicon may have changed or variants that may have developed thirdly

Which place names are recorded survived and fallen to use are also about who is in power and what the city means to them into names are names given by those who live there while its names are given by outsiders this is particularly common in colonized regions consider mapping out

Where linguistic groups hold power and using important geopolitical sites to demonstrate as power spread fourthly where the linguistic traits such as syntax grammar words or emphasis on a place of end or people of a particular ethnic group can be found tell us about which groups live there or

Did so historically consider mapping out where linguistic groups are have been or have travelled through any use linguistic traits from those group to show this but that is all from me come follow me on all my places thank you so much to my patrons support my work if

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